query using debian packaging manager

I am here to show you two examples of using dpkg to query package info.

To know what deb package is installed, you can do this

dpkg -l

Usually we do this with grep, to filter only info that we are interested in, let say i want to know the packages consist of keyword gcc.

dpkg -l | grep gcc

If I want to know the binary files are from which deb package, i can do that, let say i want to know for gnome-help.

dpkg -S `which gnome-help`

which is to shows the full path for gnome-help and it uses back quote to pass the result to dpkg.

Output:

yelp: /usr/bin/gnome-help