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How to find the package that provides a file in Ubuntu ?

If you want to identify some binary belongs to which package in Ubuntu in certain situations when you want to port that binary to some other platform but don’t know which package this binary belongs to, type below command on Ubuntu terminal,

Lets say, you want to know which package the “top” command belongs to,

 $ dpkg -S $(which top) 

So, in general the command becomes as,

 $ dpkg -S $(which command_name) 

replace command_name with the command you want to find package.

“top” command package search returns as,

$ dpkg -S $(which top)
procps: /usr/bin/top 

It means, we have installed top to “/usr/bin/top” and it belongs to package “procps” so if you try to install “procps” on another ubuntu PC, you have to follow as,

 $ sudo apt-get install procps 

Similarly, you can also check “How to check which header belongs to which package in ubuntu” and “Finding list of installed files from a package in Linux”

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