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ErebusBat
Asked: 2010-11-19 15:00:18 +0800 CST

How to tell which Ubuntu package a tool is in

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As a concrete example I want to be able to take a particular tool that isn't installed (say nslookup) and be able to tell which package I need to install when the following fails:

apt-get install nslookup
E: Unable to locate package nslookup

Obviously I can google to find the answer for a specific package (dnsutils) but I want to know how to find it myself.

ubuntu apt

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There are two ways I know of to do this:

    host ~ # apt-file update
host ~ # apt-file search nslookup
dnsutils: /usr/bin/nslookup
dnsutils: /usr/share/man/man1/nslookup.1.gz
gajim: /usr/share/gajim/src/common/nslookup.py
kaptain: /usr/share/kaptain/nslookup.kaptn
kvirc2-data: /usr/share/kvirc2/help/en/nslookup.kvihelp
libgnet2.0-0: /usr/share/doc/libgnet2.0-0/examples/dnslookup.c.gz
manpages-ja: /usr/share/man/ja/man8/nslookup.8.gz
procmail-lib: /usr/share/procmail-lib/pm-janslookup.rc
rbot: /usr/share/rbot/plugins/nslookup.rb
scrollz: /usr/share/scrollz/help/nslookup
zsh: /usr/share/zsh/4.3.4/functions/Completion/Unix/_nslookup
zsh: /usr/share/zsh/4.3.4/functions/Misc/nslookup
zsh-beta: /usr/share/zsh-beta/functions/Completion/Unix/_nslookup
zsh-beta: /usr/share/zsh-beta/functions/Misc/nslookup

    and...

    host ~ # apt-cache search nslookup
host - utility for querying DNS servers
dnsutils - Clients provided with BIND
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  2. Do you have command-not-found installed?

    Just type the command in bash or zsh and it will tell you which package has it, and if you need to enable non-main repos or fix your PATH. Or call command-not-found $command_name.

    Or you could go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/file:bin/nslookup , but that defaults to karmic packages.

    • 3

  3. Do you need to do this from the command line? I usually just do a search on http://packages.ubuntu.com/ (or packages.debian.org) when I am looking for packages.

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  4. Ubuntu's online repository browser has "Search the contents of packages" feature. AFAIK, it's not implemented in apt-get/aptitude, but in the most cases you will be satisfied with "apt-get search" when searching for a package containing a similarly named program.

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