What does the pipe | indicate in apt-cache rdepends?

Solution 1:

In the example you give, the pipe | means that, for python-carquinyol-0.96 or freemind-doc, abiword is not the only package that satisfies the dependencies.

For example, if you installed freemind-doc, abiword or something else will do. Running apt-cache show freemind-doc you can see:

Recommends: evince | openoffice.org-writer | abiword | kword | pdf-viewer

which means that installing any of these packages is sufficient.

Compare that to the package xubuntu-desktop, shown without a |:

Recommends: abiword, abiword-plugin-grammar, ...

Here there are no alternatives to abiword; if you want all the recommended packages installed, you must install abiword.