Re: apt / aptitude question

[Neal Murphy <neal.p.murphy@alum.wpi.edu>]

On Sunday, November 11, 2012 04:59:34 PM David Guntner wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Mandriva refugee here. :-)  New to Debian, but have been using some form
> of *NIX since 1986.  Have been a happy Mandriva user since the Mandrake
> 7 days, but that new company that purchased it, resulting in them losing
> most of their talent, has finally caused me to leave; the last update to
> the OS (which was the first under the new regime) left me with a system
> that barely runs.  So I looked around and decided that Debian might be a
> good distro for me to use (plus, my webhosting provider is using Debian
> on their servers; I decided it might be nice to not have to change
> mental gears when I ssh into my vps :-) ).
> 
> I've been working on figuring out the various quirks and differences
> between the two and Google Has Been My Friend in this a lot. :-)  Even
> managed to find a reference to using an Ubuntu source to install Freenx
> from the .deb packages that they provide since for some reason Debian
> doesn't (so that's something I won't have to do without - yay!).
> 
> However, I've had no luck finding any useful information on this one
> particular item; maybe I'm just not wording the search correctly.  I'm
> hoping someone here can give me a hand.
> 
> In Mandriva, they use a wrapper to rpm called urpm{x} (where "{x}"
> represents an action that you want to do "i" for install, "e" for erase,
> etc.).  There are options that allow you to see what files are related
> to packages, whether they are installed in the system or not.  There are
> two in particular that I'd like to have happen here.
> 
> In Mandriva if I enter:
> 
> urpmq -i {somepackage}
> 
> I will get an output that's pretty similar to what I get if I enter:
> 
> aptitude show {somepackage}
> 
> in Debian.  So far, so good.  However, on the Mandriva side, if I enter:
> 
> urpmq -fi {somepackage}
> 
> I'll get the package information *and* a listing of all files provided
> by that package.  I can't seem to figure out (or find out) how to do
> that same thing in Debian.  Is there a way?  And if so, how to do it?
> 
> As to the second variation on this theme, under Mandriva, if I enter:
> 
> urpmf {somefilename}
> 
> It will spit back a list of all packages that provide that filename or
> any part of it.  It's treated like a substring - for example if I type
> "urpmf kross" it will list the package that provides /usr/bin/kross, and
> will then go on to show other packages that have that string in it like
> /usr/lib64/libkokross.so.7 and so on.  This can be controlled by
> entering something like "urpmf /usr/bin/kcross", though other things in
> /usr/bin that start with "kcross" will also show up.
> 
> I haven't figured or found out yet how to get that kind of search
> functionality within Debian.  So as above, is there a way to do this,
> and if so, how?
> 
> Thanks for any help!
> 
>                   --Dave

I believe you are looking for dpkg-query...

Which packages provides files with 'pattern' in the name?
  dpkg-query -S kross
  dpkg-query -S bin/kross

What files does kdelibs-bin provide?
  dpkg-query -L kdelibs-bin

What are the details for package kdelibs-bin?
  dpkg-query -p kdelibs-bin