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

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Sun 16 Nov 03,  7:12 PM, David Hummel <ddhummel@pacbell.net> said:
> 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

sure, try this:

p@satan$ auto-apt search xargs
usr/bin/xargs   base/findutils


or this:

p@satan$ apt-cache search xargs
findutils - utilities for finding files--find, xargs, and locate


pete



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