Useful APT

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Apt and dpkg are the package managers for Debian and Ubuntu distro's. Most common uses are apt-get install <package> or apt-get remove <package>. But there is some more you can do. For example make a list of all packages on your system, then install the same packages on a target system.

dpkg --get-selections

will give you a full list of installed package. You can also use

dpkg -l

returns a similar list, but shows some more info

if you write the output of to a file, then it could be used together with --set-selection to install all packages on another machine

cat packagelist.txt | dpkg --set-selections

followed by

apt-get dselect-upgrade

This way you can easily synchronise all package on different machines.

dpkg -L <package>

-L is a handy parameter to dpkg which will show you what files a package will install.

If you want to have a quick look at what some uninstalled package might be, the use

apt-get search <package>

or if you are a lazy coder, add this to your .bashrc file:

function apts()
{apt-cache search $1
}

so all you have to type is

apts <package>