This tutorial will bring you through dpkg, the debian package manager. As I introduce apt, I will now introduce dpkg and show how to search which files are installed by a package, which packages are installed on your system.

Search packages containing a file:

It happens quite often that you use binaries and want to know which package contains it. Let’s take the example of gaim, searching file containing bin/gaim will look like this:

$dpkg -S bin/gaim
gaim: /usr/bin/gaim
gaim: /usr/bin/gaim-send
gaim: /usr/bin/gaim-remote.py
gaim: /usr/bin/gaim-client-example
gaim: /usr/bin/gaim-send-async
gaim: /usr/bin/gaim-notifications-example.py

Getting installed package:

searching for packages intalled on your system which are named gaimsomething is achieved by triggering the following command:

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