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Each of these tools is described in detail in Section 5.2.6.
Some important files used by the Debian package management tools are:
Every Debian package has a priority associated with it, indicating how important the package is to the system. The priorities are:
The possible states that a package can be in are:
The possible package selection states are:
Two possible package flags can be set for a package:
In addition to the commands described in the next section, a number of shell and Perl scripts are included with the package manager for use in managing and building packages:
For the apt- commands, options can be specified on the command line or set in the configuration file. Boolean options set in the configuration file can be overridden on the command line in a number of different ways, such as --no-opt and -opt=no, where opt is the single-character or full name of the option.
| apt-cache |
apt-cache [options] command
Perform low-level operations on the APT binary cache, including the ability to perform searches and produce output reports from package metadata. Useful for finding out information about packages.
| apt-cdrom |
apt-cdrom [options] command
Add a new CD-ROM to APT's list of available sources. The database of CD-ROM IDs that APT maintains is /var/lib/apt/cdroms.list.
| apt-config |
apt-config [options] shell args apt-config [options] dump
An internal program for querying configuration information.
| apt-extract-templates |
apt-extracttemplates [options] files
Extract configuration scripts and templates from the specified Debian package files. For each specified file, a line of output is generated with the following information:
package version template-file config-script
and the template and configuration files are written to the directory specified with -t or --temp-dir or by the configuration option APT::ExtractTemplates::TempDir. The filenames are in the form template.xxxx and config.xxxx.
| apt-ftparchive |
apt-ftparchive [options] command
Generate Package and other index files used to access a distribution source. The files should be generated on the source's origin site.
| apt-get |
apt-get [options] command [package...]
A command-line tool for handling packages. Will eventually be a backend to APT.
apt-get -f install apt-get dist-upgrade
several times to clean up interlocking dependency problems. The configuration option is APT::Get::Fix-Broken.
| apt-sortpkgs |
apt-sortpkgs [options] indexfiles
Sort the records in a source or package index file by package name and write the results to standard output. apt-sortpkgs also sorts the internal fields of each record.
| dpkg |
dpkg [options] action
A tool for installing, managing, and building packages. Serves as a frontend to dpkg-deb.
These actions are carried out by dpkg itself:
The following actions can be specified for dpkg and are passed to dpkg-deb for execution. Also see dpkg-deb.
dpkg options can be specified on the command line or set in the configuration file. Each line in the configuration file contains a single option, specified without the leading dash (-).
| dpkg-deb |
dpkg-deb action [options]
Backend command for building and managing Debian package archives. Also see dpkg; you'll often want to use dpkg to pass commands through to dpkg-deb, rather than call dpkg-deb directly.
| dpkg-query |
dpkg-query [option] command
Display information about packages listed in the dpkg database.
| dpkg-split |
dpkg-split [action] [options]
Split a binary package into smaller pieces and reassemble the pieces, either manually or in automatic mode. The automatic mode maintains a queue of parts for reassembling. Useful for transferring to and from floppy disks.
| dselect |
dselect [options] [action]
A screen-oriented user frontend to dpkg. The primary user interface for installing and managing packages. See dpkg and dpkg-deb for information on building packages.
If dselect is run with no action specified on the command line, it displays the following menu:
* 0. [A]ccess Choose the access method to use.
1. [U]pdate Update list of available packages, if
possible.
2. [S]elect Request which packages you want on your
system.
3. [I]nstall Install and upgrade wanted packages.
4. [C]onfig Configure any packages that are
unconfigured.
5. [R]emove Remove unwanted software.
6. [Q]uit Quit dselect.The asterisk (on the first line) shows the currently selected option. Any of the menu items can be specified directly on the command line as an action (access, update, select, install, config, remove, quit) to go directly to the desired activity. For example:
% dselect access
If you enter quit on the command line, dselect exits immediately without doing anything. An additional command-line action is menu, which displays the menu and is equivalent to running dselect with no action.
Options can be specified both on the command line and in the dselect configuration file, /etc/dpkg/dselect.cfg.
screenpart:[fgcolor],[bgcolor][:attr[+attr+...]]
This option can be specified multiple times, to override the default colors for different screen parts. Rather than having to specify the colors on the command line each time you run dselect, you might prefer to set them in the configuration file. The possible screen parts (going from the top of the screen to the bottom) are:
Either the foreground color, the background color, or both can be specified for each screen part. The colors are given as the standard curses colors. After the color specification, you can specify a list of attributes separated by plus signs (+). The possible attributes are normal, standout, underline, reverse, blink, bright, dim, and bold. Not all attributes work on all terminals.
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