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.