Monday, January 25, 2010

How-To: Find missing packages in Debian

apt-file is a command line tool for searching packages in Debian/Ubuntu repositories.
Unlike apt-cache search, apt-file can find files in uninstalled or can list the content of uninstalled packages.

First, we will install the apt-file package:

apt-get install apt-file

then we need to update database:

apt-file update

now we can query the database for myfile:

apt-file search FILENAME