I wanted to find packages related to transmission
, a BitTorrent client but couldn't find how to search package descriptions.
Why do this?
In certain cases, package names are not obvious; for instance a remote controll application for Transmission can be named transmission-remote-gtk
(an older one) or transgui
(more recent). The description of both packages includes transmission though. It would be practical to the non-aware user that I am, who expects other packages to have non-obvious names if there was a way to lookup package description instead.
On my system aptitude search
looks up into package names only. On the other hand there's eix -S
under Gentoo.
So how would I search packages by description under Debian? (I guess I can browse all available packages and grep
the results. I expect a more appropriate method, of course hence my question.)
EDIT: Listing results by built-in commands aptitude
and apt-cache
As suggested by Marco and MatthewRock there's aptitude search '~d<string>'
and apt-get search
. However the two appear to also include results that have nothing to do with the search string (on my system at least):
# aptitude search '~dtransmission'
p atlc - calculateur de lignes de transmission arbitraires
p atlc:i386 - calculateur de lignes de transmission arbitraires
p atlc-examples - Exemples pour le calculateur de transmission de ligne arbitraire
p between - game about consciousness and isolation
p between:i386 - game about consciousness and isolation
p boinc-app-seti - SETI@home application for the BOINC client
p boinc-app-seti:i386 - SETI@home application for the BOINC client
p boinc-app-seti-dbg - debug symbols for SETI@home
p boinc-app-seti-dbg:i386 - debug symbols for SETI@home
p boinc-app-seti-graphics - SETI@home application for the BOINC client (with graphics)
p boinc-app-seti-graphics:i386 - SETI@home application for the BOINC client (with graphics)
p ca-cacert - CAcert.org root certificates
p cstream - general-purpose stream-handling tool similar to dd
p cstream:i386 - general-purpose stream-handling tool similar to dd
p cycle - programme de calendrier pour femme
...
with aptitude
or
# apt-cache search transmission
between - game about consciousness and isolation
boinc-app-seti - SETI@home application for the BOINC client
boinc-app-seti-dbg - debug symbols for SETI@home
boinc-app-seti-graphics - SETI@home application for the BOINC client (with graphics)
ca-cacert - CAcert.org root certificates
libcollada2gltfconvert-dev - COLLDADA to glTF conversion library -- development
cstream - general-purpose stream-handling tool similar to dd
freedv - Software Defined Radio (SDR)
glfer - program for reception and transmission of QRSS/DFCW signals
libgmetric4j-java - gmetric4j Ganglia metric transmission API
libgnuradio-noaa3.7.5 - gnuradio noaa satellite signals functions
hamfax - Receive/send radio facsimile transmissions with Soundcard/PTC-II
hylafax-server - Flexible client/server fax software - server daemons
hylafax-server-dbg - Debug symbols for the hylafax server
libijs-dev - IJS raster image transport protocol: development files
libijs-doc - IJS raster image transport protocol: documentation
ike-scan - discover and fingerprint IKE hosts (IPsec VPN Servers)
ion - NASA implementation of Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN)
ion-doc - Interplanetary Overlay Network - examples and documentation
libion-dev - NASA implementation of Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) - development files
...
with apt-cache
. The above even includes results which do not match "transmission" nor "trans". Weird indeed.
apt-cache show between
gives a several paragraph description of between, including the line These things that appear are ugly and non-procedural: indecipherable transmissions bubbling up through static,… Personally I useapt-cache search transmission | grep -i transmission
to solve this problem. Not sure if there is a better way. – derobert Sep 2 '15 at 15:42aptitude
that would limit searching to only the latter part? – user86969 Sep 2 '15 at 21:21