Every distribution has a package manager and a whole lot of work goes into maintaining packages and correctly resolving their dependencies. This is a descriptive kind of dependency tracking.

The other day I had the idea of using a more “evidence based” method. Given a linked binary, you can find out what libraries it uses with ldd. (This, however, will not account for any dynamic linking that happens during runtime.) More interestingly, perhaps, given a running process, you can figure out which files it using to run. There is lsof, and if not, /proc/pid/maps has that information too.

Such a list of files can then be fed to the package manager to find the packages which own them.

For instance, which package owns init (on an Ubuntu system)?

$ findpkgs 1
upstart

What’s needed to run ls (on a Gentoo system)?

$ findpkgs ls
sys-apps/acl
sys-apps/attr
sys-apps/coreutils
sys-libs/glibc

What about a Python application like iotop?

$ findpkgs `pgrep iotop`
dev-lang/python
dev-libs/openssl
sys-libs/glibc
sys-libs/ncurses
sys-libs/zlib

The query-package-manager-for-owner-of-file tries to figure out which package manager is used on the system in this order:

1. paludis
2. qfile
3. equery
4. dpkg
5. rpm

To be honest I’m not really sure how useful this is, I just put it together since I figured out it could be done. It *can* answer the question: which packages are required to run this application? (Or to be more precise: to achieve this specific runtime state of the application.) So if you write an app, send it to a friend and he can’t make it run, you could use findpkgs to get a list of them he needs to install (provided he’s on the same distro and all that).

# Author: Martin Matusiak <numerodix@gmail.com>
# Licensed under the GNU Public License, version 3
#
# <desc> Find packages by binary or process pid </desc>
#
# <usage>
# source this file in bash, then run `findpkgs`
# </usage>
 
 
function _findpkgfor() {
	local file="$1";shift;
 
	if which paludis &>/dev/null; then
		paludis -o "$file" 2>/dev/null | grep '::installed' \\
			| sed "s/::installed//g" | tr -d ' '
	elif which qfile &>/dev/null; then
		qfile "$file" 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $1}'
	elif which equery &>/dev/null; then
		equery belongs "$file" 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $1}'
	elif which dpkg &>/dev/null; then
		dpkg -S "$file" 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $1}' | tr -d ':'
	elif which rpm &>/dev/null; then
		rpm -qf "$file" 2>/dev/null | grep -v "not owned"
	else
		echo "No known package manager found"
	fi
}
 
function findpkgs() {
	local arg="$1";shift;
 
	if [ ! "$arg" ]; then
		echo "Usage:  findpkgs [ pid | /path/to/binary ]"
		return
	fi
 
	local pid=
	local arg_new=
	local bin=
	if echo "$arg" | grep "^[0-9]*$" &>/dev/null; then
		pid="$arg"
	else
		arg_new=$(which "$arg" 2>/dev/null)
		[ "$arg_new" ] && arg="$arg_new"
		if ! echo "$arg" | grep '^/' &>/dev/null; then
			echo "Can't find absolute path (or not a binary) for: $arg" >&2
			return
		fi
		arg=$(readlink -f "$arg")
		if ! file "$arg" | grep 'ELF' &>/dev/null; then
			echo "Not a binary: $arg" >&2
			return
		fi
		bin="$arg"
	fi
 
 
	local fst=
	local fst_new=
	local files=
	if [ "$pid" ]; then
		fst=$(ps aux \\
					| sed "s/^[^ ]* *//g" \\
					| grep "^$pid " \\
					| awk '{print $10}' \\
					| tr -d ':')
		fst_new=$(which "$fst" 2>/dev/null)
		[ "$fst_new" ] && fst="$fst_new"
		if ! echo "$fst" | grep '^/' &>/dev/null; then
			echo "Can't find absolute path for: $fst" >&2
			unset fst
		fi
 
		if $(which lsof &>/dev/null); then
			files=$(lsof \\
						| sed "s/^[^ ]* *//g" \\
						| grep "^$pid " \\
						| awk '{print $8}' \\
						| grep '^/' \\
						| sort \\
						| uniq)
		else
			files=$(cat "/proc/$pid/maps" \\
						| awk '{print $6}' \\
						| grep '^/' \\
						| sort \\
						| uniq)
		fi
 
		files="$fst $files"
		for file in `echo $files`; do
			_findpkgfor "$file"
		done | sort | uniq
 
	elif [ "$bin" ]; then
		files=$(ldd "$bin" \\
					| awk '{print $3}' \\
					| grep '^/' \\
					| sort \\
					| uniq)
		files="$bin $files"
		for file in `echo $files`; do
			_findpkgfor "$file"
		done | sort | uniq
	fi
}

Download this code: findpkgs.sh