How do I discover what package provides a certain file?

[Matthew Flaschen]

Eric Dunbar wrote:
> Hi all, I was trying to figure out what package on my Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
> box provided a certain file.
> 
> In YellowDogLinux (FC-based distro) I've always used:
> 
> yum provides insertfilenamehere
> 
> And yum (yellowdog updater modified) spits out the package to which
> that file belongs.
> 
> I've scoured the man pages for apt-* (including aptitude) without
> success. It seems the search functionality in apt-get is  limited,
> poorly documented or both.

The latter.

> I used Synaptic successfully, but the only reason it found the package
> is that the file name was actually part of the package description.
> 
> 1. Anyone know how to easily search the files installed by packages?

No, but I know it's possible.,,

> 2. Second though, anyone know how to use apt-get et al. to search for
> packages (like yum find xyz)?

apt-cache search xyz

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