How do I customize the output format of `apt search`?

With some pipes and apt-cache(8) search you can do it:

$ apt-cache search libbsd | grep '^[^ ]*libbsd' | tr "\t" " " | sed 's/ -/\t-/' | column -t -s$'\t' | sort
libbsd-arc4random-perl  - CPAN's BSD::arc4random -- Perl bindings for arc4random
libbsd-dev              - utility functions from BSD systems - development files
libbsd-resource-perl    - BSD process resource limit and priority functions
libbsd0                 - utility functions from BSD systems - shared library

This is quite similar to what aptitude seems to print, except for the first field, which seems to be from dpkg(1); maybe with some extra pipes you could get the info from dpkg(1), if you really want it. ;)

(Here's what I see with aptitude:)

$ aptitude search libbsd
p   libbsd-arc4random-perl                     - CPAN's BSD::arc4random -- Perl bindings for arc4rand
i   libbsd-dev                                 - utility functions from BSD systems - development fil
p   libbsd-resource-perl                       - BSD process resource limit and priority functions   
i   libbsd0                                    - utility functions from BSD systems - shared library 

posted 4 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

4mo ago

alx‭

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