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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

Is there a cli tool to browse that, or do you have to go to the web?

If you have the ports tree [0] installed, you can browse through /usr/ports. There's a subdirectory in there for each port, named "category/port". You can search the ports tree using (replace foo with your search term):

  $ make -C /usr/ports search key=foo

You can install the ports tree by running:

  # portsnap fetch extract

[0]: http://www.freshports.org

Thanks. I'm a deb/ubu bloke, but always curious as to the details of other package management systems.

An alternative with less typing:

    $ whereis foo

This will return the path to the relevant port if it exists.

In addition to searching through ports, pkg-ng has a really nice search command. pkg search $string will search through the pkg database for matching strings.

Yes, "pkg search <pkg name>" generates list of available matching packages. "pkg search -f <pkg name>" will give salient pkg info in a multi-line format. Use "pkg help search" to pull up the man page for "pkg search" with all the gory option details. "pkg help" shows a list of available pkg commands.

"pkg" has become a very useful, reliable tool.

You can also display a list of all packages in the repository with

    pkg search -g '*' | less

Better pipe it to less because there are over 25000 packages.

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