Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali and other related distributions uses apt-get as package manager. All of these distributions are deb or dpkg related distributions. apt-get provides different type of commands to list, search, install, remote, revert etc. Detailed information about apt-get can found in the following tutorial.

http://www.poftut.com/apt-and-apt-get-tutorial-with-examples/

In this tutorial we will look apt-cache search command in detail.

Search Packages

We can search deb packages from repositories with the following command by providing a search term. In this example we will search for tmux keyword.

$ apt-cache search tmux

Search Package Names Only

In previous example we have search the given term all package information like package name, description, text etc. We can make a search only in the package names with --names-only . In this example we will search for apache only in the packages names part.

$ apt-cache search --names-only apache

Search Part Of Text

If we do not know the whole keyword to search we can use glob * to imply. In this example we want to search packages for term starts with apache .

$ apt-cache search apache*

List All Packages with Apt-Search

We can use glob or regex single character . to list all packages with the apt-cache search

$ apt-cache search *

OR

$ apt-cache search .