Many search terms take a string as a parameter and match it against one or more fields of a package. Strings can be entered either with or without double quotes (“"”), so “?name(scorch)” and “?name("scorch")” will perform the same search.

If you enter a “bare” string, one not surrounded by double quotes, then aptitude will consider the string to have “ended” when it encounters the closing parenthesis or the comma before a second argument to the search term. ^[11] To remove the special meaning of these characters, place a tilde (“~”) directly before them. For instance, ?description(etc)) is a syntax error, because the first ) ends the ?description term, and the second ) does not match anything. In contrast, ?description(etc~)) matches any package whose description contains the text “etc)”. There are additional considerations if you are using the shorthand notation for a term; see the section called “Shorthand for search terms” for details.

Most textual searches (for package names, descriptions, etc) are performed using case-insensitive regular expressions. This means that you must backslash-escape regular expression metacharacters ^[12] in searches (for instance, to find “g++”, you should use the pattern “g\+\+”).