Prasad Pillarisetti wrote: > Guys recently I had this question asked in a technical interview. > > How do I find out the package owning a particular file, when no package > managers are installed? If it was a system using deb packages, you could go to /var/lib/deb and search there I think. > > I am assuimg SRPMs are used to install the software? rpm is not the only packaging system available. Is the question generic or related to a particular flavour of Unix/Linux? > > Is this actually possible? Install the Linux OS without a package manager? Linux is a kernel. If floppy based Linux distributions are anything to go by, I would say yes. > > I know "rpm -qf filename" gives the package owning the file. > But how to get the package name when I don't have any package manager? Depends on the packaging system. Never tried looking inside /var/lib/rpm files... > > Maybe this was a question to rattle me? Or the interviewer is very savvy.