RFE: Ability to search for files provided by a package

[Aaron Whitehouse]

I am on Dapper Flight 6 fully updated.

I wanted to know which package provided the binary command that I type and was surprised not to find that as a search option. Searching for the command in "description/name" did not find it and, in the end, I went to the debian packages site and used their search engine to do it. It would be a useful feature for those commands that are hard to tie to a package.

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

Try the following command:
dpkg -S FILENAME

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

For packages that are not installed you can install apt-file that will do what you need.

[Trouilliez vincent (vincent-trouilliez-modulonet)]

Hi there,

I would like to revive this bug and a "me too" ;-)

I regularly have to find out what package a particular file is in (when trying to install pre-compiled programs, and they often complain of missing files, so I must figure out what packages they are in, in order to make the program happy so it can start).

So far I have to open a web browser, go to packages.ubuntu.com, do the search, note the package name, close the browser, open synaptic and search for the package.
It would be much more convenient if the file search could be performed directly from within Synaptic.
Synaptic being a full featured, comprehensive package manager, it's reasonable to expect it to be able to do this simple/common thing, even more so since it already has other search options implemented (it's just one more).

You say that apt-file can do it at the command line, so maybe Synaptic can just use it to perform the search..