yum vs. apt-get
 

In Fedora I can use yum to retrieve a list of available packages using 'yum list |grep [package]'. I have been unsuccessful finding this functionality in apt-get, using Ubuntu. I do not want to use the 'Add/Remove Applications' manager GUI.

Edit: Oops. After rereading my post, I realized it looks somewhat like a statement. This is a question.

you could always do

I think it would be overkill to try to view 20,000+ programs in the shell. Any reason you don't want to use Synaptic?

Your example didn't turn up exactly what I want, as I don't know regular expressions. However, it showed me "apt-cache pkgnames", which will give me a list of packages. But this method does not show me if they are installed, or from what repo they came.

I can easily grep for what I am looking for.

I find the CLI is faster in this case. I can quicker enter "apt-get ..." than go through the Synaptic menus.

dpkg --list foo* will show whether any packages that have foo in their name are installed or not. Check out the documentation from the Debian home page to learn more about dpkg, apt and aptitude.

you could launch aptitude by typing aptitude at the command line, it is basically synaptic with out the gui