How to list and search available software packages on Ubuntu

Introduction

This guide covers the basics of listing and searching for packages available for installation on Ubuntu.

Please note that this guide assumes that you are logged in as the root administrative user.

Procedure

Before using the options below, you should first ensure that you have updated your package information.

apt-get update

You can use apt-cache to search for packages based on a keyword. By default, it formats its output in a more compact way.

apt-cache search keyword

Alternatively, you may use apt to perform a similar search. This method adds color and has a more human-readable format by default.

apt search keyword

The keyword that you use in the above commands is a regular expression. This means that you could just type the exact name of the package you want, only a portion of the name, or you could use the full regular expression syntax to perform an advanced search. It is also possible to get the entire list of all available packages with either of these utilities by using a period (.) character as your search term.