On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 12:30:23AM -0800, Bob Miller wrote: > >How can I find out what a Debian package is? In an RPM based system, >you can use "rpm -qi $package" to learn about it. Here's an example. > > $ rpm -qi wget > ... > Description : > GNU Wget is a file retrieval utility which can use either the HTTP or > FTP protocols. Wget features include the ability to work in the > background while you're logged out, recursive retrieval of directories, > file name wildcard matching, remote file timestamp storage and comparison, > use of Rest with FTP servers and Range with HTTP servers to retrieve files > over slow or unstable connections, support for Proxy servers, and > configurability. > > Install wget if you need to retrieve large numbers of files with HTTP or > FTP, or if you need a utility for mirroring web sites or FTP directories. > >How would I get the same information in Debian? It has several >thousand packages, and there are at least three that I don't know >anything about. (-: >
dpkg -l will show a package's installation status, and dpkg -p will print out a blurb about it; bofh@bugblatter:~$ dpkg -p wget Package: wget Priority: optional Section: web Installed-Size: 558 Maintainer: Nicol�s Lichtmaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Architecture: i386 Version: 1.5.3-3 Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1) Filename: dists/potato/main/binary-i386/web/wget_1.5.3-3.deb Size: 227728 MD5sum: 1fd5341edf1e673109861de1aff585ed Description: utility to retrieve files from the WWW via HTTP and FTP Wget [formerly known as Geturl] is a freely available network utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web using HTTP and FTP, the two most widely used Internet protocols. It works non-interactively, thus enabling work in the background, after having logged off. . The recursive retrieval of HTML pages, as well as FTP sites is supported -- you can use Wget to make mirrors of archives and home pages, or traverse the web like a WWW robot (Wget understands /robots.txt). Larry has posted something about using apt for a front end to this. You can also fire up good ol' dselect and search for the package name; the blurb will be in the window at the bottom of the screen. -- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
