dpkg
 

What would be the equivalent of rpm -q --whatprovides blah
in debian systems?

rpm -qa is like dpkg --list or what exactly are you looking for ? Information about a package? dpkg -p <packagename> ... just man dpkg :-)

First I know about dpkg -p and I am not that stupid not to read the man page before coming here.
In rpm we have a option
rpm -q --whatprovides which gives the package name which provides a particular utility
ex:
rpm -q --whatprovides /sbin/init
returns SysVinit-2.78
so that next time round I can try
rpm -q SysVinit
or rpm -qil SysVinit
I was just wondering whether thereis something similiar in debian systems with dpkg

This isn't a 'dpkg' command, but:

apt-cache showpkg "packagename"

displays package info.

Good Luck

apt-file is what you are after. and i did not assume you are stupid or didn't quickly check the man pages. take a look at apt-file package information.

Thanks
This is what I was looking for.

I was going through the man pages again.
apt-file would work for those packages which are not installed.
With dpkg I got this
dpkg -S /sbin/init
returned sysvinit
now i did
dpkg -p sysvinit
now
dpkg -L sysvinit
returned all the files that were installed from sysvinit
thus it worked like
rpm -q --whatprovides /sbin/init
and
rpm -qil SysVinit
Anyway thanks for your help
I must be getting more dumber every moment(I "read" the man pages but missed this information)