How to find package for installed file in Brew?

Question

How can I identify the package/formula for a given file, or a listing of all of a package\'s owned files, in Homebrew?

Answer 1

Just wrote this dirty function to get you the brew package name a file belongs to:

function brew_find_pkg {
    file_to_search="$@"

    for package in $(brew list); do
        brew ls $package | grep -E -q "/${file_to_search}$"
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            echo $package
            break
        fi
    done
}

Just type that in the terminal. And then to find to find the brew package a file belongs to, say the file gsed, just call the function like this

brew_find_pkg gsed

Note that the function will not work if you provide the full path of the file.