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regexubuntuapt

Why does apt-cache search find packages which do not match the given regular expression?

I ran the following command at linux bash:

apt-cache search 'hex.*(view|edit)'

My intention was to find any software packages whose name/description contains the pattern 'hex.*(view|edit)'. But among the results I got this:

kipi-plugins - image manipulation/handling plugins for KIPI aware programs

How could this be in the results list? I didn't see any matching string in this result. Is this a bug of the apt-cache search command? Or do I mis-understand how the regular expression is used by this command?

Solution

  • search does a full text search on all text in a package description, not just the name. If you want names only, you can use --names-only