How can I search through the source code used in Ubuntu?
There is a notification message that I'd like to modify to include more data, but it's not obvious which package it's a part of. But it includes a pretty specific string that would be easy to search on. I know there are a large number of projects included in ubuntu, but I'm hoping there's a good way to find the source when it's not apparent what program is responsible.
55 Answers
If it's that specific, Google should be able to help you -- it has indexed tons of publicly available source code. I'd be very surprised if it didn't find something.
Failing that (or any other sort of web search), strings is a pretty handy little application. It reads all the strings out of a file, even if it's binary. I've been hacking around and you can use this to find a phrase anywhere on your computer. This version is looking for "bad" in /usr/bin
find /usr/bin -exec bash -c 'if [[ $(strings {} | grep -i bad) ]]; then echo "{}"; fi' \;That's obviously a pretty hardcore way of doing things. But wait, there's more. You can find the package for each result as you go:
find /usr/bin -exec bash -c 'if [[ $(strings {} | grep -i bad) ]]; then dpkg -S "{}"; fi' \;Now that's what I call awesome. Here's it in action, looking for "No such device"
oli@bert:/var/log$ find /usr/bin -exec bash -c 'if [[ $(strings {} | grep -i "No such device") ]]; then dpkg -S "{}"; fi' \;
handbrake-gtk: /usr/bin/ghb
usbutils: /usr/bin/usbhid-dumpThere's an Ubuntu Code Search website that lets you search the source code of all packages in the Ubuntu repositories:
The above site appears to have been down for a while now. I'll try to get in contact with the maintainer.
Edit: I spoke to the maintainer, and this project isn't much of a priority at the moment. I'd recommend using the Debian Code Search instead, as we share a lot of packages/code with them:
The answer I know you've been dreading:
Download all the source packages and search them locally. It's about 40 GB, gzipped. I'd start by setting up apt-mirror with only deb-src entries.
I know am late but still , the package name is libnotify and the source code for it is here
Ubuntu uses the Debian Linux source code. But, you have to know that linux is a kernel (), and a distribution is the software () bundled with it. You can get the Ubuntu Source repository from archive.ubuntu.com. You can also refer to
