John McBride <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Carl Fink wrote: >> It should, I grant you, but have you tried "dpkg -S"? > >here's a nasty one: > >> expectk >bash: expectk: command not found > >root> dpkg -S expectk >dpkg: *expectk* not found.
Ah, here you have a different search facility ;) dpkg -S searches the system for packages owning a particular file. If you want to search for package names, try 'dpkg -l *expectk*' or 'apt-cache search expectk' (the latter searches descriptions as well). If you want functionality like rpm's --whatprovides, the easiest way is probably to install the grep-dctrl package. Then you can do something like: grep-available -FProvides expectk ... or, for more concise output: grep-available -FProvides -nsPackage expectk You can also use grep-status to search the packages you have installed rather than those that are available. Beware that you need to use 'dselect update' rather than 'apt-get update' to have this work, confusingly enough. I know this isn't obvious to start off with (grep-dctrl seems to have a very low profile, but it rocks :)); I found it all very nice indeed once I got used to it, though. Searching for a specific file in all uninstalled packages is probably about the trickiest search to do. The best way to do this is to get hold of the Contents-i386.gz (or similar for other architectures) file off your CD or a Debian mirror, decompress it with gunzip, and grep or otherwise search it for the filename in question. HTH, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
