Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Name

aptitude

Synopsis

aptitude [options] [action [arguments]]

A text-based frontend to apt, which can be run either directly from the command line or from a visual mode that runs in a terminal window.

Actions

The following actions are supported. Running aptitude with no action invokes the visual mode. Package names can be entered individually or as search patterns. A search pattern consists of terms starting with a tilde (~), followed by a character indicating the type of term, followed by the text to be searched for. The most common usage is to use ~n to search for a package name (e.g., ~nemacs, to search for packages that have emacs in their name). You can find the full list of term types in the Aptitude User’s Manual. The manual can be found in /usr/share/doc/aptitude/README on a Debian-based system. On an RPM-based system with aptitude installed, the README file may be in /usr/share/aptitude or /usr/share/doc/aptitude.

autoclean

Clean out the cache by removing only packages that can no longer be downloaded.

changelog package[=version | /archive] ...

Download and display the Debian changelog for each specified package.

clean

Clean out the cache by removing all previously downloaded .deb files.

download package[=version | /archive] ...

Download the .deb file for each specified package to the current directory. With a version, install that version; with an archive, install the version from that archive.

forbid-version package[=version] ...

Don’t allow aptitude to upgrade the package to a particular ...