How to search for a package with pacman?
I just installed Archlinux and want to install netstat. However using the command pacman -Ss netstat outputs irrelevant package names. A search on internet revealed that netstat is owned by net-tools. Installing net-tools gave me access to netstat.
How should one proceed to find the package name to install with pacman when only the final bash command is known ?
The best way that I have found until now is to use the pkgfile command.
You could install it by:
# sudo pacman -S pkgfile
according to the official arch wiki,
pkgfile is a tool for searching files from packages in the official repositories.
(files being the binaries you mentioned as bash commands).
You can also update its database by running:
# pkgfile -u
or you could just enable its systemd timer for it to update automatically:
# systemctl enable pkgfile-update.timer
# systemctl start pkgfile-update.timer
awsome, right ?! 🙂
Example
# pkgfile netstat
core/net-tools
extra/munin-node
# pkgfile netstat --verbose
core/net-tools 1.60.20160710git-1 /usr/bin/netstat
extra/munin-node 2.0.26-2 /usr/lib/munin/plugins/netstat