How to find out where the contents of a package are installed

aptpackage-management

I ran into this bug, where Cantor can't find the sage backend if both are installed through the ubuntu package system. I can get around this bug if I know the path to the sage executable, but even after installing cantor-backend-sage I can't figure out where sage is located. locate and find both return loads of files called message-something, and have been unhelpful. which sage and whereis sage return nothing.

Is there some way to figure out where apt-get installs everything in a package?

Best Answer

Which files were installed by package? dpkg -L package.
Which files will package install? apt-file list -F package.

Also the other direction is possible:

Which package installed this file? dpkg -S file
Which package do I need to install for file? apt-file search file.

Related Solutions

Debian – How to convince APT that a cross-arch package is installed manually

I haven't played much with multiarch systems, so there may well be a better way than what I'm proposing here. I haven't tested my proposal, I'm not sure that it doesn't run against some peculiarity of multiarch.

You can use equivs to create dummy packages for dependencies only.

Create a control file with equivs-control make.control
Edit the control file: set Package: make, Architecture: armhf, Depends: make:amd64, and Multi-Arch: foreign. You may want to set Version to match the amd64 make version as well.
Create the dummy package: equivs-build make.control
Install the dummy package in the chroot

If this doesn't satisfy dpkg, a different approach that will work but is less convenient is to not install the amd64 make inside the chroot, but instead make the host root available inside the chroot (with a bind mount, see Providing /bin and /lib inside a chroot jail for examples), or at least the make binary and its dependencies (which for make is just libc). Add the directory where the binary is mounted to the PATH. Create a dummy package as above, but just declare make as installed, don't put any Depends or Multi-Arch header.

Apt – checking if a similar package has been installed

If you want to write a script to check to see if package libncurses-dev or its alias has been installed, consider the following program flow:

Check if the package has been installed with dpkg using the exact name, libncurses-dev in this case.
If the above does not evaluate to true, then search apt for the package you are looking for using the non-aliased name:
```
$ apt-cache search libncurses-dev
libncurses5-dev - developer's libraries for ncurses
```

It appears that apt-cache search will return the 'alias' if the package has one.

If #1 evaluates false and #2 returns an alias, just grab the package's alias and try #1 again.

Check dpkg again with the alias name of the package, in this case it would be libncurses5-dev. If dpkg does not find the package by an alias (actually a superseded package) then it must not be installed.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Debian – How to convince APT that a cross-arch package is installed manually

Apt – checking if a similar package has been installed

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