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How can I search through the source code used in Ubuntu?

There is a notification message that I'd like to modify to include more data, but it's not obvious which package it's a part of. But it includes a pretty specific string that would be easy to search on. I know there are a large number of projects included in ubuntu, but I'm hoping there's a good way to find the source when it's not apparent what program is responsible.

Rob Mosher
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  • what notification message? – Rinzwind Feb 16 '12 at 15:31
  • What specifically are you trying to add? What notification message to what part of the OS? – Thomas Ward Feb 16 '12 at 16:30
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    The notification message is irrelevant. I'm not looking for this particular piece of source code. I'm looking for a general solution this problem in any case. The details are there just to make clear what type of situations I would want to do this in. – Rob Mosher Feb 16 '12 at 16:52
  • notify-send doesn't work for you ? – daisy Jun 10 '12 at 01:14
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    @warl0ck how would I use notify-send in this case? It seems it creates a notification message, rather than tracking down the source of a message. – Rob Mosher Jun 11 '12 at 15:37

5 Answers5

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If it's that specific, Google should be able to help you -- it has indexed tons of publicly available source code. I'd be very surprised if it didn't find something.

Failing that (or any other sort of web search), strings is a pretty handy little application. It reads all the strings out of a file, even if it's binary. I've been hacking around and you can use this to find a phrase anywhere on your computer. This version is looking for "bad" in /usr/bin

find /usr/bin -exec bash -c 'if [[ $(strings {} | grep -i bad) ]]; then echo "{}"; fi' \;

That's obviously a pretty hardcore way of doing things. But wait, there's more. You can find the package for each result as you go:

find /usr/bin -exec bash -c 'if [[ $(strings {} | grep -i bad) ]]; then dpkg -S "{}"; fi' \;

Now that's what I call awesome. Here's it in action, looking for "No such device"

oli@bert:/var/log$ find /usr/bin -exec bash -c 'if [[ $(strings {} | grep -i "No such device") ]]; then dpkg -S "{}"; fi' \;
handbrake-gtk: /usr/bin/ghb
usbutils: /usr/bin/usbhid-dump
ish
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Oli
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There's an Ubuntu Code Search website that lets you search the source code of all packages in the Ubuntu repositories: http://ubuntu-codesearch.surgut.co.uk/

The above site appears to have been down for a while now. I'll try to get in contact with the maintainer.

Edit: I spoke to the maintainer, and this project isn't much of a priority at the moment. I'd recommend using the Debian Code Search instead, as we share a lot of packages/code with them: https://codesearch.debian.net/

Logan
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The answer I know you've been dreading:

Download all the source packages and search them locally. It's about 40 GB, gzipped. I'd start by setting up apt-mirror with only deb-src entries.

ændrük
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I know am late but still , the package name is libnotify and the source code for it is here http://libnotify.sourcearchive.com/documentation/0.4.4/notify-send_8c-source.html

Ashwin Surana
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Ubuntu uses the Debian Linux source code. But, you have to know that linux is a kernel (http://www.kernel.org/), and a distribution is the software (http://www.gnu.org/) bundled with it. You can get the Ubuntu Source repository from archive.ubuntu.com. You can also refer to https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu

Vibhav
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