Tuesday, February 25, 2020
extracting filenames from packages available in debian
Back in 2016, I wanted to check the names of existing command-line utilities in order to avoid a collision when I renamed my blogging software to wrt.
I wound up using apt-file data to see what binaries are available from Debian
packages, and I’ve referenced the list of files I generated then a bunch of
times since. It’s obviously way out of date by now, and today I had a similar
question to answer, so here’s a scripted version of that process that worked on
my current machine, running Debian Buster:
#!/bin/sh
# Make sure we've got apt-file and lz4 compression utils:
sudo apt install apt-file lz4
# Update lists:
sudo apt-file update
cd /var/lib/apt/lists
lz4cat ./*.lz4 | \
grep -E '^(usr/bin/|sbin/|bin/)' | \
cut -f1 -d' ' | \
perl -pe 's/^(.*)\/(.*)$/$2/' | \
sort | uniq > ~/used_names.txt
Then you can grep whatever ~/used_names.txt to look for binaries.
The main difference here is that the contents lists are now in
/var/lib/apt/lists, as LZ4-compressed files named like
deb.debian.org_debian_dists_buster_main_Contents-amd64.lz4.
I haven’t taken the time to investigate whether this data is still just loaded
for apt-file’s benefit or is in some way more integrated with apt or what.
Maybe I’ll revisit at some point.
Today’s used_names.txt is attached to this post just in case it’s helpful to people coming in from web search.
more: used_names.txt