Find Which Package owns a File in Linux
Sat, Jun 26, 2010
Sometimes it is necessary to find out which package is responsible for a particular file on a Linux machine. This article explains how to identify the package that owns a file on Ubuntu or Fedora Linux (it applies to any distribution using deb or RPM, so it will also work in Debian, RedHat, etc…)
To identify the package that owns a file in Ubuntu or other deb-based distributions, you want to use the dpkg-query command with the -S option, in the form: dpkg-query -S /path/to/file
So, for example, if you wanted to find the owner of /usr/bin/gst-feedback-0.10, your terminal should appear as:
gstreamer0.10-tools: /usr/bin/gst-feedback-0.10
jdeprizi@orion:~$
Similarly, you can find the RPM that owns or installed a file in Fedora or RedHat with the rpm -qf command. Here is an example:
gstreamer-0.10.29-1.fc13.i686
[jdeprizi@pioneer ~]$
For either of these commands to work, the package owning the file must be installed. This is necessary because the ownership needs to be registered with the package manager.
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PiSi-based Distributions: Pardus…
Similarly, Pardus has a search-file command with file-name parameter is used in order to find which package does a file belong to.
$ pisi sf -q /usr/bin/gst-feedback-0.10
Package gstreamer has file /usr/bin/gst-feedback-0.10
$
In Slackware, it’s pretty simple as well -
$ grep usr/bin/gst-feedback-0.10 /usr/bin/gst-feedback-0.10 /var/log/packages/*
/var/log/packages/gstreamer-0.10.29-x86_64-1:usr/bin/gst-feedback-0.10
$
On a system using yum, such as fedora, you can use repoquery in the same manner as rpm — the only difference is now the package doesn’t need to be isntalled, just available in one of the repositories.