How to find package for installed file in Brew?

Question

How can I identify the package/formula for a given file, or a listing of all of a package\'s owned files, in Homebrew?

Answer 1

To see all files in a package:

brew ls <package>

To find the package for a file, look at the file like this:

ls -l /usr/local/bin/whatever

If it was installed by Homebrew, it will be a symlink into /usr/local/Cellar/something, so that will tell you what package it's from.

Answer 2

Find and brew prefix, (e.g. for opencv):

find `brew --prefix opencv3`/ -exec ls -l {} \;

(Please note judicious use of -exec, and never forget those \;'s, folks .. its how find knows that the -exec arg-list is finished..)

Answer 3

Just wrote this dirty function to get you the brew package name a file belongs to:

function brew_find_pkg {
    file_to_search="$@"

    for package in $(brew list); do
        brew ls $package | grep -E -q "/${file_to_search}$"
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            echo $package
            break
        fi
    done
}

Just type that in the terminal. And then to find to find the brew package a file belongs to, say the file gsed, just call the function like this

brew_find_pkg gsed

Note that the function will not work if you provide the full path of the file.

Answer 4

The package name can be determined based on the symbolic link which points to the binary (Cellar/PACKAGE/...), e.g.

$ ls -la $(which awk) # => gawk
lrwxr-xr-x 1 kenorb 28 May 20  2015 /usr/local/bin/awk -> ../Cellar/gawk/4.1.1/bin/awk

$ ls -la $(which seq) # => coreutils
lrwxr-xr-x 1 kenorb 14 Apr  8  2015 /usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin/seq -> ../../bin/gseq

Answer 5

Homebrew packages are installed to $(brew --prefix)/Cellar (normally /usr/local/Cellar).

To find out which packages a file belongs to, one simple approach is:

$ find $(brew --prefix)/Cellar/ | grep somefilename

Answer 6

This function works for commands stored in the $( brew --prefix )/bin directory.

function brew_find_pkg {

    cmds_to_search="$@"
    brew_bin=$( brew --prefix )/bin

    for cmd in $cmd_to_search ; do

        if [ -L $brew_bin/$cmd ] ; then
            \ls -l $brew_bin/$cmd |cut -f 2 -d '>'
        else
            echo "$cmd is not a brew command"
        fi
    done
}

E.g.:

$ brew_find_pkg gawk gcc alskdfja
 ../Cellar/gawk/4.1.4_1/bin/gawk
 ../Cellar/gcc/5.3.0/bin/gcc
alskdfja is not a brew command