How to find packages containing a specific file?

Question

I want to find out which packages (if any) contain a specific file name. For instance, I'm trying to compile 32-bit programs in a 64-bit machine and GCC complains about a missing file "gnu/stubs-32.h". How can I quickly find which package I should install?

Answer 1

If using a Debian-based distribution, you can use apt-file:

apt-file search path/to/filename (but for it to work, you must first populate the database, running apt-file update as root)

If using an RPM-based distribution (Red Hat, Fedora, etc), there is the equivalent yum provides : yum provides path/to/filename , which supports wildcards (for instance: yum provides \\*/gnu/stubs-32.h ).

Answer 2

A quick google search would also point you to a previous stackoverflow question. There you will find out that you need the 32 bit libc-dev package (libc6-dev-i386).