What are the minimal fields needed in a dpkg status file, grep-status -vF Status 'purge ok not-installed' -s ??? >/tmp/status for apt-get -o Dir::State::status=/tmp/status dist-upgrade --print-uris -yqq to give the same result as apt-get dist-upgrade --print-uris -yqq (These are my first steps at computing machine1's URI needs, on machine2. A kind of run-time apt-zip.)