How to find package for installed file in Brew?

Question

How can I identify the package/formula for a given file, or a listing of all of a package's owned files, in Homebrew?

Answer 1

To see all files in a package:

brew ls <package> 

To find the package for a file, look at the file like this:

ls -l /usr/local/bin/whatever 

If it was installed by Homebrew, it will be a symlink into /usr/local/Cellar/something, so that will tell you what package it's from.

Answer 2

Just wrote this dirty function to get you the brew package name a file belongs to:

function brew_find_pkg {     file_to_search="$@"      for package in $(brew list); do         brew ls $package | grep -E -q "/${file_to_search}$"         if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then             echo $package             break         fi     done } 

Just type that in the terminal. And then to find to find the brew package a file belongs to, say the file gsed, just call the function like this

brew_find_pkg gsed 

Note that the function will not work if you provide the full path of the file.