> (Save yourself a few keystrokes: just type 'grep purge packages.txt'.) Definitely! Thanks for pointng that out. > sed -i 's/purge$/install/' packages.txt > dpkg --set-selections < packages.txt OK, so it is just done manually. I was wondering if there are any special tools (like dpkg, dselect, etc) which one can use to set those statuses. Thanks!