Configuration file reference in the aptitude reference manual

List of Examples 2. Sample resolver costs 2. Use of the? Grouping policy firstchar or firstchar binary 2. Grouping policy firstchar source 2. Use of pattern to group packages by their maintainer 2. Use of pattern with some packages placed at the top level 2. Use of the pattern grouping policy with sub-policies Usage of --show-summary. If the verbosity level is 1 or greater, the package's architecture, compressed size, filename, and md5sum fields will be displayed.

If the verbosity level is 2 or greater, the select version or versions will be displayed once for each archive in which they are found. This is a thin wrapper over apt 8. Each version is listed on a separate line. The leftmost three characters indicate the current state, planned state if any , and whether the package was automatically installed; for more information on their meanings, see the documentation of aptitude search. To the right of the version number you can find the releases from which the version is available, and the pin priority of the version.

If the input is a search pattern, or if more than one package's versions are to be displayed, aptitude will automatically group the output by package, as shown above. In addition to the above options, the information printed for each version can be controlled by the command-line option -F. The order in which versions are displayed can be controlled by the command-line option --sort.

To prevent aptitude from formatting the output into columns, use --disable-columns. Adds a user tag to or removes a user tag from the selected group of packages.

User tags are arbitrary strings associated with a package. They can be used with the? Explains the reason that a particular package should or cannot be installed on the system. This command searches for packages that require or conflict with the given package.

It displays a sequence of dependencies leading to the target package, along with a note indicating the installed state of each package in the dependency chain:. The command why finds a dependency chain that installs the package named on the command line, as above. Note that the dependency that aptitude produced in this case is only a suggestion. This is because no package currently installed on this computer depends on or recommends the kdepim package; if a stronger dependency were available, aptitude would have displayed it.

In contrast, why-not finds a dependency chain leading to a conflict with the target package:. If one or more pattern s are present in addition to the mandatory last argument, which should be a valid package name , then aptitude will begin its search at these patterns.

That is, the first package in the chain it prints to explain why package is or is not installed, will be a package matching the pattern in question. If no patterns are present, then aptitude will search for dependency chains beginning at manually installed packages. This effectively shows the packages that have caused or would cause a given package to be installed.

That is, it looks for a chain that only contains packages which are installed or will be installed; it looks for the strongest possible dependencies under that restriction; it looks for chains that avoid ORed dependencies and Provides; and it looks for the shortest dependency chain meeting those criteria. These rules are progressively weakened until a match is found. If the verbosity level is 1 or more, then all the explanations aptitude can find will be displayed, in inverse order of relevance.

If the verbosity level is 2 or more, a truly excessive amount of debugging information will be printed to standard output.

This command returns 0 if successful, 1 if no explanation could be constructed, and -1 if an error occurred. Removes all previously downloaded. Removes any cached packages which can no longer be downloaded. This allows you to prevent a cache from growing out of control over time without completely emptying it.

Downloads and displays the Debian changelog for each of the given source or binary packages. Downloads the. If no packages are listed, the entire package database is copied; otherwise only the entries corresponding to the named packages are copied. Any existing package database files in the output directory will be overwritten.

Dependencies in binary package stanzas will be rewritten to remove references to packages not in the selected set. The following options may be used to modify the behavior of the actions described above. Note that while all options will be accepted for all commands, some options don't apply to particular commands and will be ignored by those commands.

For full-upgrade , safe-upgrade , forbid-version , hold , install , keep-all , markauto , unmarkauto , purge , reinstall , remove , unhold , and unmarkauto : add the user tag tag to all packages that are installed, removed, or upgraded by this command as if with the add-user-tag command. For full-upgrade , safe-upgrade , forbid-version , hold , install , keep-all , markauto , unmarkauto , purge , reinstall , remove , unhold , and unmarkauto : add the user tag tag to all packages that match pattern as if with the add-user-tag command.

For instance, aptitude safe-upgrade --add-user-tag-to "new-installs,? When the safe resolver is being used i. Allow the safe-upgrade command to install new packages; when the safe resolver is being used i. Default: true. Description: If this option is true , then aptitude will not consider packages to be unused and thus will not automatically remove them as long as any installed package recommends them, even if APT::Install-Recommends is false.

Description: If this option is true , then aptitude will not consider packages to be unused and thus will not automatically remove them as long as any installed package suggests them. If either of these options is set to false , aptitude will not delete old package list files after downloading a new set of package lists. Description: If this option is true and Aptitude::Auto-Install is true , then whenever you mark a package for installation, aptitude will also mark the packages it recommends for installation.

Furthermore, if this option is true , aptitude will not consider packages to be unused and thus will not automatically remove them as long as any installed package reommends them. Option: Aptitude::Allow-Null-Upgrade. Default: false. Description: Normally, if you try to start an install run when no actions will be performed, aptitude will print a warning and return to the package list.

Option: Aptitude::Autoclean-After-Update. This option is similar to Aptitude::Clean-After-Install. Option: Aptitude::Auto-Fix-Broken.

Description: If this option is false , aptitude will ask for permission before attempting to fix any broken packages. Option: Aptitude::Auto-Install. Description: If this option is true , aptitude will automatically attempt to fulfill the dependencies of a package when you mark a package to be installed or upgraded.

Description: If this option is true , aptitude will automatically remove conflicting packages when you mark a package to be installed or upgraded. Normally these conflicts are flagged and you must handle them manually. Option: Aptitude::Auto-Upgrade. Option: Aptitude::Clean-After-Install. This option is similar to Aptitude::Autoclean-After-Update. Description: In command-line mode, if this is set, aptitude will always prompt before starting to install or remove packages, even if the prompt would normally be skipped.

This is equivalent to the -P command-line option. This is equivalent to the -y command-line option. Description: If this option is enabled, the results of command-line searches performed via aptitude search will not be formatted into fixed-width columns or truncated to the screen width.

This is equivalent to the --disable-columns command-line option. Description: In command-line mode, if this option is true , aptitude will download package files but not install them. This is equivalent to the -d command-line option. Description: In command-line mode, if this option is true , aptitude will be more aggressive when attempting to fix the dependencies of broken packages. This is equivalent to the -f command-line option. Default: Set to auto , none , package , or source-package to control whether and how the output of aptitude versions is grouped.

Equivalent to the command-line option --group-by see its documentation for more description of what the values mean. Description: In command-line mode, causes aptitude to ignore the installation of untrusted packages. This is equivalent to the -F command-line option. Description: This option gives the width in characters for which command-line search results should be formatted. If it is empty the default; ie, "" , search results will be formatted for the current terminal size, or for an column display if the terminal size cannot be determined.

Description: This option controls whether command-line progress indicators display the percentage on the left-hand side of the screen, in the same style as apt-get , or on the right-hand side the default. This option does not affect download progress indicators.

Description: If this value is false , then command-line progress indicators will be deleted and overwritten once the task they represent is completed. If it is true , then they will be left on the terminal. Default: Description: When run in command-line mode, if dependency problems are encountered, aptitude will add this value to the problem resolver score of each action that you explicitly request. Description: In command-line mode, if this option is true , aptitude will print extremely verbose information while attempting to resolve broken dependencies.

As the name suggests, this option is primarily meant to aid in debugging the problem resolver. Description: In command-line mode, if it is necessary to resolve broken dependencies and this option is set to the name of a writable file, the resolver state will be dumped to this file before any calculations are undertaken. Description: In command-line mode, if this option is true , aptitude will display a brief summary of the dependencies if any relating to a package's state.

This is equivalent to the -D command-line option. Description: In command-line mode, if this option is true , aptitude will display the expected change in the amount of space used by each package. This is equivalent to the -Z command-line option. Default: no-summary. Description: This option sets the default value of the command-line argument --show-summary. See the documentation of --show-summary for a list of the allowed values of this option and their meanings.

Description: In command-line mode, if this option is true , aptitude will display the version of a package that is being installed or removed. This is equivalent to the -V command-line option. Description: In command-line mode, if this option is true , aptitude will display the manually installed packages that require each automatically installed package, or the manually installed packages that cause a conflict with each automatically removed package.

This is equivalent to the -W command-line option and displays the same information you can access via aptitude why or by pressing i in a package list. Default: Set to always , auto , or never to control when package names are displayed in the output of aptitude versions. Equivalent to the command-line option --show-package-names see its documentation for more description of what the values mean.

Equivalent to the command-line option --show-resolver-actions. Description: The minimum size in bytes at which aptitude will begin to display screenshots incrementally.

Note aptitude 's behavior and appearance can be configured in a number of ways. Using aptitude from the command line The aptitude terminal user interface.