Ubuntu – Find package name using terminal

You can search for package names using the command line and the apt-cache command. For example, enter the following command to find out what the package name is for firefox

apt-cache search firefox

If you get a long list of results, you can view (pipe) the results in a viewer or a text file

apt-cache search firefox | less

apt-cache search firefox > ~/firefox-list.txt

The command apt-cache search searchstring performs a full text search over all the software sources registered on your Ubuntu system. It will search the package names and the descriptions for an occurrence of the searchstring and prints out the package name and the short description, including virtual package names.

if --names-only is given then the long description is not searched, only the package name is. This option usually gives a smaller set of results.

for i in *.txt; do mv $i ${i%%.txt}; done

It's a simple for cycle, just like the one you wrote. Note I've used ; instead of newlines so that I can type it into a single line. The only construct that is new to you is the ${i%%.txt}, which simply means $i, with whatever following the %% signs cut off from the end of $i.

A good tip: if unsure what would happen, try adding echo in front of the actual command, so that you would see the exact commands that are to be executed. E.g.:

for i in *.txt; do echo mv $i ${i%%.txt}; done