Aptitude Explained

In this article, I am going over the aptitude command and explaining all of the commands and usage that goes with its usage.

Install Aptitude

Run the following command to install aptitude and task select: sudo apt install aptitude tasksel

Why Aptitude?

Aptitude provides greater dependency resolution and wildcard installations. Making installing or reinstalling entire packages far easier. For instance the following command installs KDE in a simple command: aptitude install ~t^desktop$ ~t^kde-desktop$

aptitude install

install one or more packages:
- sudo aptitude install gedit
remove a package
- sudo aptitude install gedit
purge a package
- sudo aptitude install gedit_
hold a package at its current version
- sudo aptitude install gedit=
build dependencies for a package
- sudo aptitude install gedit&BD

aptitude remove, purge, reinstall

These are the same as using the above commands under install, however, you can utilizing these independent commands with wildcards like below

sudo aptitude purge ^kde-desktop$

aptitude hold, unhold, keep

hold is the same as the install, but again I like to use this long hand version when utilizing wildcards.
unhold – is a great way to release held packages
keep – I DO NOT USE because it merely cancelled scheduled tasks for that package… only it will continue to be upgraded later.

aptitude update, safe-upgrade, full-upgrade

update – updates the cache
safe-upgrade – upgrades all packages but will not remove unused packages
full-upgrade – upgrades all packages but WILL remove unused packages

aptitude search

search – searches for the package, these search results can use wildcards, be sorted, and culled as needed using various options
search examples:
- Search for packaged installed from outside stable repo
  - aptitude search '?narrow(?installed, !?archive(stable))'
- Search for packages installed by the testing repo but not stable
  - aptitude search '?narrow(?installed, ?archive(testing) !?archive(stable))'
- List installed packages
  - aptitude search ~i
- List reverse dependencies for gedit
  - aptitude search ~Dgedit
- show broken packages
  - aptitude search ~b
- display packages on hold
  - aptitude search ~ahold
- Find and install all packages with the name tightvnc in it
  - aptitude search ~ntightvnc
- Install a specific version of a package
  - aptitude install php=5.6

aptitude show

aptitude show
- displays information about the package

aptitude why, why-not

aptitude why – explains why a package can’t be installs because of a missing dependency
aptitude why-not – show conflicts in which the package dependency can not be installed

aptitude clean and autoclean

aptitude clean – removes all previously downloaded packages from the cache directory
aptitude autoclean – removes cached packages which no longer exist in your repositories

aptitude search terms

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/aptitude/ch02s04s05.en.html#tableSearchTermQuickGuide

Video Walkthrough

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