Setcap not found in Debian 9

Question

I'm using a installation scripts that needs setcap and it's not found. What package contains it? libcap2 is already installed.

Answer 1

Searching for setcap

I believe setcap is contained in this package libcap2-bin. I found this by googling for "debian setcap" which led me to this man page:

• https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/libcap2-bin/setcap.8.en.html

The title of the man page tells you which package it resides in:

/ jessie / libcap2-bin / setcap(8)

Now that we "think" we know the package's name we can search for it:

• https://packages.debian.org/jessie/libcap2-bin

If you scroll down to the bottom of that page you'll see all the various architectures. Click the link for amd64:

• https://packages.debian.org/jessie/amd64/libcap2-bin/filelist

Found it

And there's setcap:

File list of package libcap2-bin in jessie of architecture amd64
/sbin/capsh
/sbin/getcap
/sbin/getpcaps
/sbin/setcap
/usr/share/doc/libcap2-bin/README.Debian
/usr/share/doc/libcap2-bin/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/libcap2-bin/changelog.gz
/usr/share/doc/libcap2-bin/copyright
/usr/share/man/man1/capsh.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/getpcaps.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man5/capability.conf.5.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/getcap.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/pam_cap.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/setcap.8.gz

Answer 2

Just do a search to see if a package has that command using

apt-file search setcap

if apt-file is not install first get it installed then re-issue above :

sudo apt install apt-file -y  && sudo apt-file update
apt-file search setcap

the entry you want appears as

libcap2-bin: /sbin/setcap

now you know which package has it so install using

sudo apt-get install libcap2-bin

to see contents of a package issue

dpkg -L some-package
dpkg -L libcap2-bin

output includes these

/sbin/getcap
/sbin/setcap

so now you know how to install setcap and its get counterpart getcap