DNF whatprovides
dnf
is the package manager for Red Hat based Linux distros (RHEL
itself, Fedora, CentoOS, etc.). It fits the same niche as apt
for
Debian based distros and Homebrew (brew
) on MacOS.
One thing that those two are missing though is the whatprovides
subcommands and from what I've seen is not that well known but is
something that is a reason in and of itself to use those distros that
use dnf
.
whatprovides
allows you to figure out the package that provides a
particular executable. For example, I often forget what the package
provides ping
when I need to install it in a container for debugging
purposes. On distros using dnf
, I can simply run dnf whatprovides ping
and it will tell me the package, or packages, that provide it
and I can then install it.
$ dnf whatprovides ping
Last metadata expiration check: 1 day, 0:03:52 ago on Tue 29 Nov 2022 06:01:46 UTC.
iputils-20180629-10.el8.x86_64 : Network monitoring tools including ping
Repo : @System
Matched from:
Provide : /bin/ping
Filename : /usr/bin/ping
Filename : /usr/sbin/ping
This saves time from having to go to your search engine and search
“install