Finding the owning package of a file

yadu · 11-12-2005, 08:40 AM

How can I find the name of the package that owns a given file in Debian? That is, is there an option in dpkg that is equivalent to the command 'rpm -qf <filename>'? (If you don't know what this does, an example would be say, running 'rpm -qf /boot/vmlinuz' would give the output "/boot/vmlinuz belongs to package kernel-default-2.6.12-1").

The man page for dpkg didn't help. Or should I be looking at something other than dpkg? Thanks for any pointers.

dastrike · 11-12-2005, 09:03 AM

dpkg -S somefile

Example: what package provides /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-1-k7 ?

Code:

$ dpkg -S /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-1-k7
linux-image-2.6.12-1-k7: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-1-k7

And the answer is: linux-image-2.6.12-1-k7

And on the same subject one can do the opposite as well: what files does a package provide: In that case one would use
dpkg -L somepackage

Note that dpkg can only perform these operations regarding installed packages. For digging in package content listings for packages that aren't installed it can be easiest to use e.g.: http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_contents

yadu · 11-12-2005, 09:09 AM

Awesome! Thanks.