Home Explore Blog CI



man-pages

3rd chunk of `apt.man`
a75a86b96b6e21c2008fa431e13cf2fbabeb5bbba68713e90000000100000cf2
 have grown to like even though they were once installed just as a
           dependency of another package. You can mark such a package as
           manually installed by using apt‐mark(8). Packages which you have
           installed explicitly via install are also never proposed for
           automatic removal.

       satisfy (apt‐get(8))
           satisfy satisfies dependency strings, as used in Build-Depends. It
           also handles conflicts, by prefixing an argument with "Conflicts: ".

           Example: apt satisfy "foo, bar (>= 1.0)" "Conflicts: baz, fuzz"

       search (apt‐cache(8))
           search can be used to search for the given regex(7) term(s) in the
           list of available packages and display matches. This can e.g. be
           useful if you are looking for packages having a specific feature. If
           you are looking for a package including a specific file try apt‐
           file(1).

       show (apt‐cache(8))
           Show information about the given package(s) including its
           dependencies, installation and download size, sources the package is
           available from, the description of the packages content and much
           more. It can e.g. be helpful to look at this information before
           allowing apt(8) to remove a package or while searching for new
           packages to install.

       list
           list is somewhat similar to dpkg-query --list in that it can display
           a list of packages satisfying certain criteria. It supports glob(7)
           patterns for matching package names, apt‐patterns(7), as well as
           options to list installed (--installed), upgradeable (--upgradeable)
           or all available (--all-versions) versions.

       edit-sources (work-in-progress)
           edit-sources lets you edit your sources.list(5) files in your
           preferred text editor while also providing basic sanity checks.

SCRIPT USAGE AND DIFFERENCES FROM OTHER APT TOOLS
       The apt(8) commandline is designed as an end-user tool and it may change
       behavior between versions. While it tries not to break backward
       compatibility this is not guaranteed either if a change seems beneficial
       for interactive use.

       All features of apt(8) are available in dedicated APT tools like apt‐
       get(8) and apt‐cache(8) as well.  apt(8) just changes the default value
       of some options (see apt.conf(5) and specifically the Binary scope). So
       you should prefer using these commands (potentially with some additional
       options enabled) in your scripts as they keep backward compatibility as
       much as possible.

SEE ALSO
       apt‐get(8), apt‐cache(8), sources.list(5), apt.conf(5), apt‐config(8),
       apt‐patterns(7), The APT User's guide in /usr/share/doc/apt-doc/,
       apt_preferences(5), the APT Howto.

DIAGNOSTICS
       apt returns zero on normal operation, decimal 100 on error.

BUGS
       APT bug page[1]. If you wish to report a bug in APT, please see
       /usr/share/doc/debian/bug-reporting.txt or the reportbug(1) command.

AUTHOR
       APT team

NOTES
        1. APT bug page
           http://bugs.debian.org/src:apt

APT 2.7.3                         20 July 2023                           APT(8)

Title: APT Package Management: Dependency Handling, Searching, Information Display, and Script Usage
Summary
This section covers several APT functions: marking packages as manually installed to prevent autoremoval, satisfying dependencies, searching packages, displaying package information, listing packages based on criteria like installed or upgradeable, and editing sources lists. It also outlines the differences between using `apt` as a user tool versus using dedicated APT tools like `apt-get` and `apt-cache` in scripts for better backward compatibility.