[TriLUG] still new to apt-get, must be missing something...

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Greg Brown <gwbrown1 at gmail.com> writes:
> I've read the man page and messed around with apt-get but there is
> still one thing I can't seem to do and that is list all the packages
> that COULD be installed by apt-get if I wanted to (the equiv of 'yum
> list').  Google doesn't seem to be much help either.  Any ideas?

`apt-cache pkgnames` will do it, but 'tis an awfully long list.

I would suggest installing aptitude, which is a nice full-screen
front-end for spelunking around the list of packages that also has a
command-line interface that is pretty much the same as apt-get, so you
can just do `aptitude install foo` if you want.

It also has other nice features---you can configure it to keep track
of packages that were only installed to satisfy the dependencies of
another package, and when the last package depending on a package so
marked, it will uninstall the marked package as well.

Mike
-- 
You're such a delicate boy -- Garbage