Chapter 7. The Debian package management tools

43

This method has the advantage over

dpkg   search

in that it will find files in packages

that are not currently installed on your system.

apt file search

foo

Similar to the above, it searches files which contain the substring or regular expression

foo

in their full path names. The advantage over the sample above is that there is no need

to retrieve the

Contents ARCH.gz

files as it will do this automatically for all the sources

defined in

/etc/apt/sources.list

when you run (as root)

apt file update

.

7.5 Why doesn't get `foo data' removed when I uninstall `foo'?

Some packages that are split in program (`foo') and data (`foo data'). This is true for many

games, multimedia applications and dictionaries in Debian and has been introduced since

some users might want to access the raw data without installing the program or because the

program can be run without the data itself, making it optional.

In these cases, `foo data' doesn't depend on `foo', so when you remove the `foo' package it

will not get automatically removed by most package management tools. This is necessary to

avoid circular dependencies. If you use

aptitude

(see `aptitude' on page

38

) as your package

management tool it will, however, track automatically installed packages and remove them

when no packages remain that need them in your system.