I want to write some generic instructions on how to find the package that installs a particular file (the exact context is TeX packages: find the package in the Unix distribution that contains a particular TeX package). I might not know the precise path but will know the exact file name.

Ubuntu has the package search facility which allows me to do precisely this: search for the packages containing a particular file.

Which other Unix distributions have the same online search capability, and where are they?

(I found a few related questions, but none seemed to give the answer I'm looking for (though my search skills are distinctly poor, I freely admit). In particular, I couldn't get the method described by What is the Fedora equivalent to the Debian/Ubuntu package search pages? to work for, say, amsmath.sty or latex.ltx.)

  • 2
    For Debian/Ubuntu apt-file works well. – Faheem Mitha Aug 30 '12 at 9:51
  • @FaheemMitha You are right, but I was particularly interested in online methods. – Loop Space Aug 30 '12 at 9:57

In Arch Linux the German site lets you search for the package that contains a file (Datei).


Yes. http://rpm.pbone.net does this for almost all rpm based first distros at once.

Unfortunately it sounds like this is something the user should be expected to know for their own respective systems. If you go to far in covering all your users based is documentation, you are likely to propagate confusion as time goes on and better ways of doing this arise for each system. If you do document these kind of examples, make sure you do so in a publicly editable medium such as a wiki so that the barrier is low for people with more current knowledge of diverse systems than you can maintain useful info.


For Solaris 11, http://pkg.oracle.com/ has a search facility. Nothing like that online for older Solaris releases though, since their SVR4 package system didn't have online repository or search support, unlike the new IPS system in Solaris 11.

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