Re: Number of Debian packages available.

[Tom H <tomh0665@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 08:01:59AM -0400, Tom H wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 6:58 AM, Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> wrote:
>> >
>> > According to my reading of the manual:
>> >
>> > aptitude search '~smain'
>> >  and
>> > aptitude search '~smain|~scontrib|~snon-free'
>> >
>> > should give you the answers you seek, however, I seem to get 0 for the
>> > first and only 626 for the second, so my search-fu is failing me today.
>>
>> Because "~s" ("?section()") doesn't correspond to main/contrib/non-free.
>
> What does, then?

(Andrei uses this search term in his replies)

"~A" ("?archive()")

You can see the section to which a package belongs ("utils" in this
case) if you request that information when specifying a format for the
output of aptitude or dpkg-query, for example:

[th@localhost:~]$ dpkg-query -W
-f='${Package}\t${Section}\t${Version}\n' util-linux
util-linux	utils	2.20.1-5.2
[th@localhost:~]$ aptitude search -F '%p %s %t %v' util-linux
util-linux                                                 utils
testing                                 2.20.1-5.2
util-linux-locales                                         utils
testing                                 <none>
[th@localhost:~]$ aptitude search -F '%p %s %t %v' util-linux\$
util-linux                                                 utils
testing                                 2.20.1-5.2
[th@localhost:~]$