Find what package a file belongs to in Ubuntu/Debian?

I frequently find myself missing a program, man page, or other file when working on my Ubuntu 8.04 system. Is there any simple way to look up what package contains a given file (whether it is installed already or not)? Maybe some obscure option for apt or dpkg?

Solution 1:

apt-file search filename

or

apt-file search /path/to/file

To install apt-file, use:

sudo apt-get install apt-file

You will need to update its database before you can use it:

sudo apt-file update

Solution 2:

(Debian/Ubuntu) Discover what package a file belongs to:

dpkg -S /usr/bin/ls

'dpkg -S' just matches the string you supply it, so just using 'ls' as an argument matches any file from any package that has 'ls' anywhere in the filename. So usually it's a good idea to use an absolute path. You can see in the second example that 12 thousand files that are known to dpkg match the bare string 'ls'.

Solution 3:

packages.debian.org is what I always use to accomplish this task. It is superior over apt-file because it can find parts of filenames as well. It's also linked up to the main packages list which will list descriptions, bugs, etc. All in all a good website. Not as useful from the command line, but still quite useful.

For speed, I bookmarked the url:

http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=contents&keywords=%s&mode=filename&suite=unstable&arch=any

in Firefox, and added "debfind" as a keyword (click "more" in the bookmark manager with it hilighted), so I can just type "debfind " and it will work. You can change 'suite' it from unstable to stable or testing if you like, for other versions of the distribution.

Solution 4:

You can also use dlocate. From the man page;

$ dlocate [ PATTERN ]
List all records where either the package name or the filename matches PATTERN.