Debian Package Management Simplified

These are some Debian specific commands which are used frequently for completely command line based Debian package management Using Aptitude aptitude update

fetches latest package list from server and updates local package list

aptitude install <package_name>

installs package

aptitude remove <package_name>

removes package but it's configuration files

aptitude purge <package_name>

removes packages along with it's configuration files

Using aptitude search aptitude search <search_pattern> e.g. aptitude search ~c ~v

Virtual Packages

~U

Upgradeable Packages

~o

Obsolete Packages

~N

New Packages

~i

Installed Packages

~g

Garbage Packages

~c

Removed packages with configuration files not removed

~b

Broken Packages

~M

Automatically Installed Packages

Note : Sometimes “aptitude search ” doesn't yield better results. One can use “apt-cache search ” in this case.

Using dpkg dpkg -L <package_name>

lists files installed for particular package

dpkg -S

shows which e.g. dpkg -S dpkg -S dpkg -S

dpkg -l

parent package the file belongs to /bin/ls $(which ls) /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

lists all available packages with their state (installed, not-installed etc)

Some more useful commands apt-cdrom add

adds CD / DVD to repository in /etc/apt/sources.list

Note: * You should have at least following two lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free You can replace "stable" with information ... just Google it ;)

"testing"

or

"unstable".

For

more

* Make a habit of running "aptitude update" before installing any package, which ensures that you get latest updated version