Searching for packages

Unfortunately, the naming conventions used for packages in Ubuntu Server aren’t always obvious. Worse, package names are often very different from one distribution to another even for the same piece of software. While this book and other tutorials online will outline the exact steps needed to install software, if you’re ever on your own, it really doesn’t help much if you don’t know the name of the package you want to install. In this section, I’ll try to take some of the mystery out of searching for packages.

In the previous section, we went over searching for Snap packages, so I won’t repeat that here. The APT suite of utilities also has a means of searching for packages as well, which is the apt search command. We can use the following command to search for packages, by providing a keyword:

apt search <search term>

The output from this command will show a list of packages that match your search...