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I am very curious to know how it would be possible to find the name of a particular program installer package (before installing the program itself) based on the subject my interest and the way to obtain information about it via the command line.

The only link that I have found is this Unix & Linux post, and it would not work in Ubuntu.

Would you help me discover how to find for example the packages that install music players?

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Tower
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1 Answers1

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  1. Synaptic package manager.

    This is a GUI-based package manager for ubuntu (also debian). By default, it categories packages into categories: games, internet, desktop environments, etc. Clicking on a category will show a list of candidate packages. Clicking on individual packages will reveal details about the package.

    If the selection is too broad, you can use the search feature to narrow down the search.

    You can install synaptic using the following command:

    sudo apt install synaptic

  2. Using the terminal:

    apt-cache search ***search-parameters***

    Sometimes there are too many candidates and the list will scroll by in the terminal pretty fast. You can pause the list at page-interval by:

    apt-cache search ***search-parameters*** | less

    Once a package interest you, details of the package can be viewed via:

    apt-cache show ***`package-name`***
muru
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  • Thank you very much for both solutions. Synaptic is very nice and the way by the bash is magnificent. You rock. Thank you very much again. – Tower Dec 02 '16 at 07:42