How do I find out which package owns a file?

Question

How do I find out what Debian package a file came from?

Answer 1

There are several utilites in Debian which perform this task; check this page for a description. I'll mention two of them, apt-file and dlocate.

apt-file searches its internal cache, thus allowing you to not install all the packages you want to search. Search is performed by launching apt-file search file.name.

dlocate is a fast alternative to dpkg -L (the command that lists package contents), and as so, it searches only installed packages. Search is performed by dlocate -S file.name.

Also you can search packages online using packages.debian.org server (the Search the contents of packages section).

Answer 2

user@host:~$ dpkg-query -S /bin/bash 
bash: /bin/bash

Where bash is the package name.

Answer 3

Another alternative:

$ dpkg -S /bin/bash
bash: /bin/bash

On my Ubuntu at least, both seem to be in the dpkg package, so no real advantage to any specific one...