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)