Dubious output when using regex with apt-cache search

[Siddh Raman Pant]

In a noble VM, I wanted to search only for bindgen package, so I tried the following:

$ apt-cache search ^bindgen$
bindgen - Automatically generate Rust FFI bindings to C and C++ libraries
bindgen-0.65 - Automatically generates Rust FFI bindings to C and C++ libraries

Why is bindgen-0.65 listed? $ should match with the EOL (man page does indeed refer to regex(7)).

[David Kalnischkies (donkult)]

Note the remark ", including virtual package names." in the manpage.

bindgen-0.65 has a "Provides: bindgen" (with a version), so it has (also) the virtual package name "bindgen" and that perfectly matches your regex. So, working as intended & documented and hence I am changing the status to opinion (could be a question, but I don't seem to have the rights to do that)

[Siddh Raman Pant (siddhpant)]

Thank you very much! That clears it up.