Recover “ps” command

Question

So I found myself in a situation where I needed to copy the ps command though I suppose that I use mv instead of cp. I copied the binary to the incorrect location and immediately deleted it. Looking back to the source in bin\, I couldn't find the binary anywhere.

I attempted to reinstall the coreutils package in Ubuntu but ps hasn't come back to me; is there another package where ps comes from?

Answer 1

Using dpkg -S /bin/ps will tell you that this program is in the procps package. Reinstall it using apt-get install --reinstall procps.

Answer 2

Using the Packages website

The http://packages.ubuntu.com/ site comes in handy in such situations.

Example: search package contents for ps reveals the procps package.

Using the command-not-found feature

Type the command misspelled and search the suggested packages:

$ ps-
No command 'ps-' found, did you mean:
 Command 'psi' from package 'psi' (universe)
 Command 'psc' from package 'sc' (universe)
 Command 'psf' from package 'tcm' (universe)
 Command 'ps' from package 'procps' (main)