How do I get the prosaic description of a package using apt? I tried both apt-cache show and apt-cache showpkg but no luck.
Using synaptic it's easy as typing the package name and the description is given by the standard view, but sometimes I'd prefer to just use apt-cache, for example from terminal.
If you would just use apt-cache search package-name, all packages with "package-name" in it would be returned. To limit to a package named "package-name", use:
apt-cache search ^package-name$
apt-cache show <packagename> does what you want. You might have overseen it. The following command highlights it:
apt-cache show scons | grep --color -E "Description|$"
Lekensteyn answer is great to get the short description. Extending Martin's answer you can get also the larger multi-line description (also in other languages):
apt-cache show figlet toilet | grep -E "^Package|^Description-en|^ "
If you use this a lot you can add this function to your .bashrc/.zshrc:
apt-desc() { apt-cache show "$@" | grep -E "^Package|^Description-en|^ "; }
For a normal case just use the friendlier apt show.
Assuming you are looking for a specific package, I believe the following is what you are in search of:
apt-cache search some-pkg
If I have misunderstood what you are trying to do, please let me know.
Strange, for example apt-cache search ^vim$ doesn't only find the vim package, but some more, but not all, that apt-cache search ^vim finds.
So better use this:
PACKAGE=vim
apt-cache search ^$PACKAGE$|egrep "^$PACKAGE -"
