What's the best way to find the uninstalled aptitude package associated with a command? I'm aware of apt-file but it's output is usually hard to parse.
For example, apt-file search ifconfig outputs 45 results. I could probably use some regex to reduce that even more, but that's far from ideal.
I'd like to be able to do something like findpkg ifconfig and see net-tools without clutter.
That's a job for dpkg-query.
dpkg-query -S /path/to/file
gives you the name of the package which installed the matched file. You'll want to use the exact path to get an output without clutter, luckily /sbin/ifconfig like in your case can be easily retrieved with which:
$ dpkg-query -S $(which ifconfig)
net-tools: /sbin/ifconfig
Reversely, dpkg-query -L PACKAGENAME prints a list of files installed by the given package, e.g.:
$ dpkg-query -L net-tools | grep ^/sbin/
/sbin/nameif
/sbin/ipmaddr
/sbin/plipconfig
/sbin/ifconfig
/sbin/route
/sbin/mii-tool
/sbin/iptunnel
/sbin/rarp
/sbin/slattach
See man dpkg-query for more.
apt-file provides some options we can use to get rid of the clutter output:
-l, --package-only Only display package name; do not display file names.-x, --regexp Treat pattern as a (perl) regular expression. See perlreref(1) for details. Without this option, pattern is treated as a literal string to search for.
Therefore, to search for a command's package the following line can be used:
apt-file -lx search "/COMMAND$"
To make it easier let's define a function:
$ findpkg() { apt-file -lx search "/$1$";}
$ findpkg ifconfig
net-tools
See man apt-file for more about this command and perldoc.perl.org for an introduction on perl regular expressions.
bin(orsbin) directory, I often find it useful to simply prependbin/to the search term e.g.apt-file search 'bin/ifconfig'– steeldriver Oct 11 '17 at 23:03apt-filewill search uninstalled packages (at least for the repositories that the user has in theirsources.list/sources.list.d) – steeldriver Oct 11 '17 at 23:13