Search Apt package descriptions

On Ubuntu (or Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc), the command line package manager is Apt. Many people use the apt-get command to install and uninstall packages. I prefer to use the Aptitude command line program, which is a more robust front-end to apt; it allows you to search packages for keywords, and it gives a bit more human-readable information when managing packages. The usual method of searching packages is to issue the command "sudo aptitude search keyword". Here's an example using the keyword flash: $ sudo aptitude search flash p flashplugin-nonfree - Adobe Flash Player plugin installer p flashrom - Universal flash programming utility p flashybrid - automates use of a flash disk as the root filesystem p libflash-dev - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - development files p libflash-mozplugin - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - Mozilla-compatible plugin p libflash-swfplayer - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - stand-alone player p libflash0c2 - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - shared library p libroxen-flash2 - Flash2 module for the Roxen Challenger web server p m16c-flash - Flash programmer for Renesas M16C and R8C microcontrollers p mobile-basic-flash - Home applet for Hildon p vrflash - tool to flash kernels and romdisks to Agenda VR This method only searches the package names for the search term. To search package descriptions, you can pipe aptitude's output through grep, like so: $ sudo aptitude search . | grep flash p amideco - Decompress flashfiles equipped with an AMI p awardeco - Decompress flashfiles equipped with an AWA p flashplugin-nonfree - Adobe Flash Player plugin installer p flashrom - Universal flash programming utility p flashybrid - automates use of a flash disk as the root p ftdi-eeprom - Tool for reading/erasing/flashing FTDI USB p granule - flashcard program for learning new words p kwordquiz - flashcard and vocabulary learning program p kwordquiz-kde4 - flashcard and vocabulary learning program p libflash-dev - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - development file ...etc... Here we use aptitude's search "dot" wildcard, which effectively lists all available packages. We then pipe this output through grep, which filters out the input to show only lines which contain the search terms.

Unfortunately, grep truncates the input lines, chopping off part of the description. If you find something interesting, though, you can always use aptitude to search for the package name to get the full description.