Erik Christiansen writes: > On 10.01.20 11:10, Alessandro Vesely via Dng wrote: >> On Fri 10/Jan/2020 01:35:55 +0100 Erik Christiansen wrote: >> > On 09.01.20 17:44, Alessandro Vesely via Dng wrote: >> >> >> >> Synaptic is convenient as it allows to search for keywords, e.g. "pdf", >> >> and >> >> choose a package that does the task at hand. Google does the same, but >> >> is not >> >> version specific. >> > >> > For many years I have found "apt-cache search <sometext>", piped to more >> > or grep for further refining, eminently satisfactory. Yes, "pdf" is a >> > sufficiently vague query to elicit a surfeit of matches, but when I look >> > for e.g. "avr", the matchlist is very concise.
Heartily agree with using apt-cache in combination with one's favourite pager. >> apt-cache, yes! That works very well. If I pipe through less rather than >> more >> I can restrict the output by, say, '&view', and examine a package by issuing >> '!apt-cache show package| less'... > > Ah, thank you for the trade. The less efficient habit of using more and > grep has remained with me for four decades or more, from before the days > of SunOS 4.1.3. Less was apparently around even then, but I've never > looked at its manpage before your hint. ... It's harder to change habits > now, though. I've gotten so used to saying `pager` at the command-line that it is one of the first aliases I create on non-Debian-based systems :-) On Debian-based systems you get whatever is configured as the default pager so if you have `less` installed you get that. If you don't have installed, you get `more`. Personally, I prefer `lv` as I have to deal with Japanese in various encodings :-/ but it also does on the fly decompression. Great when looking at a compressed /usr/share/doc/*/changelog.Debian.gz! # There's still no zpager, even after asking for it two decades ago :-O # # https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=49942 Hope this helps, -- Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2 FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27 GnuPG key: F84A2DD9/B3C0 2F47 EA19 64F4 9F13 F43E B8A4 A88A F84A 2DD9 Support Free Software https://my.fsf.org/donate Join the Free Software Foundation https://my.fsf.org/join _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
