Find a macports package given a file name

Question

How can one find out the name of the port given a file name, more concretely an executable?

Macport website does not seem to help as you can only search by title and little more.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Unfortunately MacPorts currently (2.3.1) only supports that if you have the port installed, i.e. if you want to find out which port installed a file on your system. In this case, you can use port provides </full/path/to/filename>.

If you are looking for a port to install using an executable name, you're out of luck – MacPorts doesn't have the required databases to do that.

What I usually do instead is search for the file in a Linux distribution, e.g. using apt-file search <filename> on Debian. Given the Debian package name, I search for a similar MacPorts port.