bjoernvold.com

I usually cheat with a GUI package managers when I want to find new programs. They have nice descriptions.
it is possible to find all installed packages in all distros:

Aptitude-based distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, etc): dpkg -l
RPM-based distributions (Fedora, RHEL, etc): rpm -qa
pkg*-based distributions (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc): pkg_info
Portage-based distributions (Gentoo, etc): equery list or eix -I
pacman-based distributions (Arch Linux, etc): pacman -Q
Cygwin: cygcheck --check-setup --dump-only *
Slackware: slapt-get --installed

Once you have this list you find that program that you have no clue what does right?

To get the description you can use apropos. Apropos is borrowed from French and means "on that Subject" :

This will tell you that unopkg is the LibreOffice extension manager.

You do not have to use the exact name will give you a list of all the packages that have libre in the name or in the description. And so on....

Here is what happens when you type apropos porn:
So if it is not there that is what you get.

I've used quite a bit. I've also used and other distribution's cli commands quite a bit.
A good list there you have! The cygwin one intrigues me. If it ever finishes downloading, I will play with that.

I'd forgotten to get a post made on this, in fact, I forgot about trying it until now.

With Cygwin, it wouldn't work the way I wanted it to with the space and star at the end... after I saw the output I decided to put it into a .txt file. You'll see the output is major long here, so it's in spoilers. Update, it won't paste into here at all from terminal in Cygwin. Looks like it's time to use showterm.

Update: I got it. Selected all in terminal, copied and pasted it into gedit, saved it to the Documents folder in C:\:


This is neat. Next stop, Mageia.