Re: The Thrill of Debian Gnu/Linux

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

John McBride <jmcbride@networkone.net> wrote:
>Carl Fink wrote:
>> It should, I grant you, but have you tried "dpkg -S"?
>
>here's a nasty one:
>
>> expectk
>bash: expectk: command not found
> 
>root> dpkg -S expectk
>dpkg: *expectk* not found.

Ah, here you have a different search facility ;)

dpkg -S searches the system for packages owning a particular file. If
you want to search for package names, try 'dpkg -l *expectk*' or
'apt-cache search expectk' (the latter searches descriptions as well).

If you want functionality like rpm's --whatprovides, the easiest way is
probably to install the grep-dctrl package. Then you can do something
like:

  grep-available -FProvides expectk

... or, for more concise output:

  grep-available -FProvides -nsPackage expectk

You can also use grep-status to search the packages you have installed
rather than those that are available. Beware that you need to use
'dselect update' rather than 'apt-get update' to have this work,
confusingly enough.

I know this isn't obvious to start off with (grep-dctrl seems to have a
very low profile, but it rocks :)); I found it all very nice indeed once
I got used to it, though.

Searching for a specific file in all uninstalled packages is probably
about the trickiest search to do. The best way to do this is to get hold
of the Contents-i386.gz (or similar for other architectures) file off
your CD or a Debian mirror, decompress it with gunzip, and grep or
otherwise search it for the filename in question.

HTH,

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]