How do I find which rpm package supplies a file I'm looking for?

As an example, I am looking for a mod_files.sh file which presumably would come with the php-devel package. I guessed that yum would install the mod_files.sh file with the php-devel x86_64 5.1.6-23.2.el5_3 package, but the file appears to not to be installed on my filesystem.

How do I find out which package installs a specific file? I'm looking for where I have not necessarily already locally downloaded the package which may include the file that I'm looking for.

I'm using CentOS 5.

Solution 1:

This is an old question, but the current answers are incorrect :)

Use yum whatprovides, with the absolute path to the file you want (which may be wildcarded). For example:

yum whatprovides '*bin/grep'

Returns

grep-2.5.1-55.el5.x86_64 : The GNU versions of grep pattern matching utilities.
Repo        : base
Matched from:
Filename    : /bin/grep

You may prefer the output and speed of the repoquery tool, available in the yum-utils package.

sudo yum install yum-utils
repoquery --whatprovides '*bin/grep'
grep-0:2.5.1-55.el5.x86_64
grep-0:2.5.1-55.el5.x86_64

repoquery can do other queries such as listing package contents, dependencies, reverse-dependencies, etc.

Solution 2:

To know the package owning (or providing) an already installed file:

rpm -qf myfilename

Solution 3:

The most popular answer is incomplete:

Since this search will generally be performed only for files from installed packages, yum whatprovides is made blisteringly fast by disabling all external repos (the implicit "installed" repo can't be disabled).

yum --disablerepo=* whatprovides <file>

Solution 4:

You go to http://www.rpmfind.net and search for the file.

You'll get results for a lot of different distros and versions, but quite likely Fedora and/or CentOS will pop up too and you'll know the package name to install with yum