Freebsd – Find which package provides certain files

Default Freebsd pkg tool doesn’t have “provides” option like the one in Red Hats yum package manager

yum provides idn2.h

But thanks to Rodrigo Osorio, you can install “pkg-provides” plugin which adds provides option to pkg tool.

root@bsd12:~ # pkg install pkg-provides

All instructions are at the end of install process. Basically you have to add 3 lines to pkg.conf and run update provides database:

root@bsd12:~ # pkg plugins
NAME       DESC                                          VERSION   
provides   A plugin for querying which package provides a particular file 0.7.1     
root@bsd12:~ # pkg provides idn2.h
Provides database not found, please update first.
root@bsd12:~ # pkg provides -u
Fetching provides database: 100%   15 MiB   4.0MB/s    00:04    
Extracting database....succes
root@bsd12:~ # pkg provides idn2.h
Name : libidn2-2.3.0_1
Desc : Implementation of IDNA2008 internationalized domain names
Repo : FreeBSD
Filename: usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html/libidn2/libidn2.html
usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html/libidn2/libidn2-idn2.html
usr/local/include/idn2.h

Setup and full usage here:

Click to access freebsd_provides.pdf