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A new program which should be deployed as package for the major distributions should avoid name clashes.

ls /usr/bin

can show me that tail is a bad choice for a new binary file name. But how can I get a list of all binaries which could be available on my system?

What is the best way to find out which file name for the executable binary is already used by other Linux packages already?

It is no problem, if the solution requires a special distribution.

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  • @jimmij You are right. I just corrected my question. Now it should make more sense. Commented Oct 6, 2014 at 17:37

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Google it.

There isn't really a better way. It could be that some other software by the same name exists but no distribution has gotten around to packaging it yet. And even that isn't fully reliable: someone else could be doing the same thing right this minute and conclude that the name is available just as you do.

You can check the package lists of major distributions, such as:

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  • The simplest way to do the same on Arch would be to use pkgfile. Commented Oct 5, 2014 at 21:40
  • @kyrias But what if one doesn't have Arch installed? For this question, it's useful to have information about distributions other than the installed one. Commented Oct 5, 2014 at 21:45
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    Yeah, just wanted to make a note of it just in case someone might wonder. The Arch repos doesn't contain a list of all files, though each repo has a files file which is a gzipped database. Searching those manually would be rather painful though so the easiest way would probably be to build pkgfile on your own distro and download the files DB, which also would be rather suboptimal. (Maybe a good project for me to make.) Commented Oct 5, 2014 at 21:53

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