Some search terms can be written using « short » forms, which
consist of a tilde (« ~
») followed by a
single character that identifies the term, and finally the arguments (if
any) to the term. For instance, the short form of
is ?name
(aptitude)~n aptitude
.
When writing a term using its short form, tilde characters and
« whitespace » -- that is, space characters, tabs, and so on --
will break the term off and start a new term. For instance,
« ~mDaniel Burrows
» will match any package
whose maintainer field contains « Daniel
» and
whose name contains « Burrows
», while
« ~i~napt
» matches installed packages whose
name contains apt
. To include whitespace characters in
the search expression, you can either place a tilde in front of it (as in
Daniel~ Burrows
) or place quotation marks around it (as
in "Debian Project"
or even Debian"
"Project
). Inside a quoted string, the backslash character
(« \ ») can be used to cancel the special meaning of the
quotation mark: for instance, ~d"\"email"
will match any
package whose description contains a quotation mark followed immediately by
email
. [16]
![]() | Note |
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Question marks (« |
Tableau 2.3, « Quick guide to search terms » lists the short form of each search term.