Aptitude/apt search question

[Bob Cox <debian-user@lists.bobcox.com>]

I may be missing the blindingly obvious, so apologies if so.

I wanted to run the 'ip' command and found it wasn't installed on the
particular box I was using.  As it was installed on another machine I
was able to:

   bob@trantor:~$ which ip
   /bin/ip

   bob@trantor:~$ dpkg -S ip | grep '/bin/ip$'
   iproute: /bin/ip

So I knew I needed the 'iproute' package.  Problem solved.

However, if I hadn't had it installed on that other machine, how could I
have discovered which package I needed *without* using the excellent
package search facility at
http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_contents - is this sort of
search possible with aptitude and/or apt-cache etc? 

-- 
Bob Cox.  Stoke Gifford, near Bristol, UK.
Registered user #445000 with the Linux Counter - http://counter.li.org/