Find out quickly which package provides a certain library with YUM

One of the most dreaded things that you can see while trying to run some application or trying to install an rpm package is a message saying that some required library is missing.

Generally this is not a big problem, because most often the library that you miss is packaged in a package named similarly to the library. Sometime however this is not the case… Suppose for example that you’re trying to install IBM JDK 5.0 on a Fedora 11 box. You’ll most likely get the following error message:

error: Failed dependencies:
libstdc++.so.5 is needed by ibm-java2-i386-sdk-5.0-9.0.i386

and there is no package named libstdc++ that you can install, so how can you find out which package do you need?

The answer is simple:

$ yum provides libstdc++.so.5

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-66.i586 : Compatibility standard C++ libraries
Repo        : fedora
Matched from:
Other       : libstdc++.so.5

Pretty neat, eh?