How to Find Which Package Contains a Specific File Using rpm Command

At times you need to know which package contains a specific file on rpm based Linux distros such as Fedora, RedHat(RHEL), CentOS, openSUSE, SLE etc. Read below to learn how.

Let's say you want to know what package provides the ip command. It's a two step process.

Finding the location of the ip binary:

To find the ip binary location, run the following command.

which ip /sbin/ip

The location is /sbin/ip as it's seen from the output of 'which'.

Finding the package name with rpm:

To find the package that contains the binary /sbin/ip, run the following command.

rpm -qf /sbin/ip iproute-3.10.0-54.el7.x86_64

From the output of 'rpm' command, you can see that the package is "iproute-3.10.0-54.el7.x86_64". So this is the package that we were looking for.

You can use any file path with 'rpm -qf' command. As long as the rpm database knows about the file. You will get a result.

Tested on: CentOS 7