Re: Dselect file list generation

[Bob McGowan <rmcgowan@veritas.com>]

Hi,

I'm new to the dselect/apt-get/... tools, (I just got Debian 2.2
installed last night and have not had time yet to play with/learn these
new tools).  I'm guessing that the output of 'apt-get -s' is a simple
list of file names (no extras, like size, in additional columns).  If
so, the following would also work, and may be easier than editing, etc. 
You need to be running bash or ksh for this to work.  The $(<filename)
is a quick way to get the shell to open a file and substitute its
contents on the command line.  So you would do these two commands, on
your separate systems:

  $ apt-get -s dselect-upgrade > list
  $ apt-get -d install $(<list)

If for some reason you don't have bash/ksh, use this for the second
line:

  $ apt-get -d install `cat list` # the quotes are back quotes, NOT
apostrophes/single quotes

The only issue with this is if the content of the file exceeds the
command line buffer size, not an issue with bash and ksh, so far as I've
found.

Alessandro Ghigi wrote:
> 
>    Is it also possible to feed that generated list back into apt-get on
>    my work linux box so that the packages can be automatically
>    downloaded to disk for burning on CD-ROM (but *not* installed
>    on the work Linux box?
> 
> What Tal says
> 
> apt-get -d install [files]
> will download, but not install.
> 
> is perfect. But you need to put 70 files in the [ ... ].
> I would use
> 
> apt-get -s dselect-upgrade > list
> 
> to put the write the output of the command in the file list.
> Then you have to edit the file list in such a way that it looks like this
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> 
> apt-get -d              install                 1st new package to install
> 
> .... this for all such packages
> 
> apt-get -d              upgrade                 1st old package to be upgraded
> 
> .... the same for all such packages.
> 
> You can do this editing job quite quickly if you use emacs.
> 
> Then you save all this text in a file called tentative-script in a directory where you  have  space enough for all the packages.
> Go in this directory and do
> 
> source tentative-scripte.
> 
> This should download the files .deb in the directory.
> 
> There is probably some much better way of doing it, but I am just a newbie.
> 
> Good luck
> 
> Alessandro
> 
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-- 
Bob McGowan
Staff Software Quality Engineer
VERITAS Software
rmcgowan@veritas.com