Ubuntu – How to find the name of a Package

aptnamingpackage-management

I want to create links to software within Software Center using the APTURL – However, I'm not sure how to find out the true "package name". What is the easiest way to discover a package's name for use with the APTURL or apt-get command?

Best Answer

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.

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