[vox-tech] finding the debian package that provides a command

[David Hummel]

Does dpkg or apt (or maybe some other tool) provide a mechanism for
determining what package a file or command belongs to for packages that
aren't installed?

Let's say I haven't gotten around to installing the package that
provides the xargs command (findutils), but I wanted to find out the
name of the package ... so that I can apt-get it.

dpkg -S does nicely for installed packages, but since it's impossible
(at least for me) to know the package names that provide every single
command or program in debian, I'm hoping there's a command line way of
doing this that's easier than searching through
http://packages.debian.org.

David Hummel