How many times have you encountered the lack of a library or header file whilst compiling a package? If you are like me who prefers installing from source rather than using the pre-compiled binaries, I often find myself googling the missing packages and determining which ones to install so my compilation will successfully finish. Today, I found this short tutorial on a nifty app, called apt-file, that searches for that missing package.

apt-file allows you to search for a file name, and it gives back the name(s) of the package(s) containing that file so that you can install the appropriate package.

So, the next time you encounter a missing file or library, just fire up apt-file and do a search. It definitely makes things easier.