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How to check which header belongs to which package in Ubuntu ?

In Ubuntu, there is a way to identify which header file belongs to which package so if you encountered an error as “header file not found” you can install the package to resolve the error,

Just follow below steps,

$ sudo apt-get install apt-file
$ sudo apt-file update

Now lets try to identify which packages contain “sys/types.h” header file,

$ apt-file find "sys/types.h"

You may get a long list of packages, one of which will be, something like below,

libc6-dev-i386: /usr/include/sys/types.h

So now if you install “libc6-dev-i386” package, you should have the header installed.

You may also want to check “Finding list of installed files from a package in Linux” and “How to check some binary belongs to which package in ubuntu”.

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