Chapter 7. The Debian package management tools

36

  Configure a package that already has been unpacked:

dpkg   configure foo

.

Among other things, this action runs the postinst (see `What is a Debian preinst, postinst,

prerm, and postrm script?' on page

28

) script associated with the package. It also updates

the files listed in the

conffiles

for this package. Notice that the 'configure' operation

takes as its argument a package name (e.g., foo), not the name of a Debian archive file

(e.g., foo_VVV RRR.deb).

  Extract a single file named  blurf  (or a group of files named  blurf*  from a Debian

archive:

dpkg   fsys tarfile foo_VVV RRR.deb | tar  xf   blurf*

  Remove a package (but not its configuration files):

dpkg   remove foo

.

  Remove a package (including its configuration files):

dpkg   purge foo

.

  List the installation status of packages containing the string (or regular expression)

 foo* :

dpkg   list 'foo*'

.

7.1.2 APT

APT is the Advanced Package Tool and provides the

apt get

program.

apt get

provides a

simple way to retrieve and install packages from multiple sources using the command line.

Unlike

dpkg

,

apt get

does not understand .deb files, it works with the packages proper

name and can only install .deb archives from a source specified in

/etc/apt/sources.list

.

apt get

will call

dpkg

directly after downloading the .deb archives

1

from the configured

sources.

Some common ways to use

apt get

are:

  To update the list of package known by your system, you can run:

apt get update

(you should execute this regularly to update your package lists)

  To upgrade all the packages on your system, run:

apt get upgrade

  To install the foo package and all its dependencies, run:

apt get install foo

  To remove the foo package from your system, run:

1

Notice that there are ports that make this tool available with other package management systems, like Red

Hat package manager, also known as

rpm