This is an extension to Alexx Roche's excellent answer. I tried to make an edit to that answer, but it got rejected (though not by Alexx)

I was trying to track down what installed which on my system. After a little work I created /usr/local/bin/apt-whatprovides

#!/bin/sh #apt-whatprovides ver. 201801010101 Copyright alexx, MIT Licence #rdfa:deps="[realpath,apt-file,grep,which,sh,echo]" BINARY="$(realpath $(which $@) 2>/dev/null)" [ -z "$BINARY" ] && BINARY="$@" echo Searching for $BINARY PACKAGE="$(apt-file search $BINARY|grep -E ":.*[^-.a-zA-Z0-9]${BINARY}$")" echo "${PACKAGE}"

Though for most THINGs that are installed you can just use:

apt-file search $(realpath $(which THING)) | grep 'THING$'

For THINGs that are not installed, you can use:

apt-file search THING | grep '/THING$'

The apt-whatprovides script works for files that are and are not on your system. For example, my system lacked dig but had ping so this it what resulted:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ apt-whatprovides ping Searching for /bin/ping inetutils-ping: /bin/ping iputils-ping: /bin/ping pi@raspberrypi:~ $ apt-whatprovides dig Searching for dig dnsutils: /usr/bin/dig epic4: /usr/share/epic4/script/dig epic4-help: /usr/share/epic4/help/8_Scripts/dig knot-dnsutils: /usr/bin/dig