Usage:

• apt-cache [options] command
• apt-cache [options] show pkg1 [pkg2 …]

apt-cache queries and displays available information about installed and installable packages. It works exclusively on the data acquired into the local cache via the ‘update’ command of e.g. apt-get. The displayed information may therefore be outdated if the last update was too long ago,but in exchange apt-cache works independently of the availability of the configured sources (e.g. offline).

Most used commands:

• showsrc - Show source records
• search - Search the package list for a regex pattern
• depends - Show raw dependency information for a package
• rdepends - Show reverse dependency information for a package
• pkgnames - List the names of all packages in the system
• policy - Show policy settings