[olug] linux web server management ?

[Christopher Cashell]

At Wed, 18 Dec 02, Unidentified Flying Banana Sam Tetherow, said:

> One of these days I'm going to spend some time on apt-file and figure
> out how to grep through a list of available packages on the command
> line.

There's actually a really easy way to search for packages:

   apt-cache search SEARCH-EXPRESSION

This will search package names and descriptions[1] for the search
expression, and return a list of packages, with their short
descriptions.  Piping the output into either less/more or a file can be
a good idea, depending on what you're looking for.  You can also pipe
the output through grep to further refine your search.

For example:

nexus:~$ apt-cache search mutt
  abook - A text-based ncurses address book application.
  lbdb - The little brother's database for the mutt mail reader
  slpim - Personal Information Manager for the console
  erlang-slang - S-Lang interface for Erlang
  aptitude - curses-based apt frontend
  fetchmail-common - POP3, APOP, IMAP mail gatherer/forwarder (common
  files)
  imapfilter - filter mail in your IMAP account
  post-el - emacs major mode for editing mail
  dictionaries-common - Common utilities and Policy for spelling
  dictionary tools
  emacs-goodies-el - Miscellaneous add-ons for Emacs
  fetchmail - SSL enabled POP3, APOP, IMAP mail gatherer/forwarder
  fetchmail-ssl - SSL-enabled POP3, APOP, IMAP mail gatherer/forwarder
  lg-issue14 - Issue 14 of the Linux Gazette.
  lg-issue62 - Issue 62 of the Linux Gazette.
  lg-issue83 - Issue 83 of the Linux Gazette.
  mutt - Text-based mailreader supporting MIME, GPG, PGP and threading.
  mutt-utf8 - Text-based mailreader supporting MIME, GPG, PGP and
  threading.
  muttprint - Pretty printing of mails with Mutt
  reportbug - Reports bugs in the Debian distribution.
  sendmail - A powerful, efficient, and scalable Mail Transport Agent.
  t-prot - display filter for RFC822 messages
  urlview - Extracts URLs from text
  muttzilla - Launch email or news clients from Netscape.

Makes it pretty easy to find most packages within a few seconds.

 [1] Though I haven't checked to be sure, I believe it examines both
     the short description, and the long description, as well as the
     name of the package, during the search.

--
| Christopher
+------------------------------------------------+
| A: No.                                         |
| Q: Should I include quotations after my reply? |
+------------------------------------------------+