New to Ubuntu/Debian

[Jan Kokoska]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 21:04 +0200, Thomas Satzinger wrote:
> Hi out there,
> 
> i switched from SuSE to Ubuntu and in one shot many problems were
> solved, wow
> Just a little question:
> What would be the tool to look into dep-packages, to see the name of the
> executable file, e.g.

Others already answered, but tu sum it up:

dpkg -S `which interesting-file` ... this displays what package contains
the interesting file, mind the backticks, useful for inserting result of
a command as parameters somewhere else

dpkg -L package ... diplay contents of a package

apt-cache show package ... display description, dependencies etc. for a
package

apt-cache search string ... searches package names and descriptions for
a string

apt-file search file ... when you need a file that you don't have and
dpkg knows nothing about it, presumably it is somewhere else in
repository

You might "need apt-get install apt-file; apt-file update" (the latter
being different from apt-get update, see man page), to use the last.

Jan