[plug] VERY basic debian question

[The Thought Assassin]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, James Andrewartha wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > if you've done an "apt-get update" then you should find a list of
> > available packages and descriptions in /var/lib/dpkg/available
> "apt-cache search foo" will often find packages related to foo that are
> available. It's probably just the same as looking at the above directory,
> but faster.

Well, /var/lib/dpkg/available is a flat file, but yes, this is faster.
To get the same result (i.e. full package descriptions) you will need the
--full option. I haven't, however, found the apt-cache equivalent of
grep "Package: foo" /var/lib/dpkg/available
to find package names starting in foo, which is something I find useful.

-Greg