Getting Information about packages in Ubuntu Linux

Finding packages:
How do you find the package that's got the feature you're looking for? First, do

sudo apt-get update

so your package list is up-to-date, and then try something like

sudo apt-cache search tunnel
sudo apt-cache search 'php.*'

That is how you tell apt to search the packages using REGEX (regular expression, a pattern-matching 'language') -- if your pattern uses any keystrokes that mean something to your command shell (e.g. [|?*] ) you'll need to quote them so that apt-cache will be able to see them, instead of having the shell expand the term to a list of file names that mean something else entirely.

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