aptitude cheatsheet
aptitude is a great alternative to apt-get and the best way to install, remove, upgrade, and otherwise administer packages on you system with apt. aptitude solves orphaned dependencies and has a curses interface that blows the doors off of dselect. Finally, and most importantly, it takes advantage of one tool, doing many many operations:
| Syntax | Description |
|---|---|
| aptitude | Running it with no arguments brings up a curses based interface to search, navigate, install, update and otherwise administer packages |
| aptitude install | Installing software for your system, installing needed dependencies as well |
| aptitude -d install | Download packages to the package cache as necessary, but do not install or remove anything. |
| aptitude remove | Removing packages as well as orphaned dependencies |
| aptitude purge | Removing packages and orphaned dependencies as well as any configuration files left behind |
| aptitude search | Search for packages in the local apt package lists |
| aptitude update | Update the local packages lists |
| aptitude upgrade | Upgrade any installed packages that have been updated |
| aptitude clean | Delete any downloaded files necessary for installing the software on your system |
| aptitude dist-upgrade | Upgrade packages, even if it means uninstalling certain packages |
| aptitude show | Show details about a package name |
| aptitude autoclean | Delete only out-of-date packages, but keep current ones |
| aptitude hold | Fix a package at it’s current version, and don’t update it |
aptitude uses many of the same commands as apt-get. It is not a good idea to use both, you should either use aptitude or apt-get exclusively, or your dependencies might get confused.