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Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition
book

Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

by Arnold Robbins
October 2005
Intermediate to advanced
908 pages
46h 42m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

Files

Some important files used by the Debian package management tools are described briefly here:

control

Comes with each package. Documents dependencies; contains the name and version of the package, a description, maintainer, installed size, the package priority, etc.

conffiles

Comes with each package. Contains a list of the configuration files associated with the package.

preinst, postinst, prerm, postrm

Scripts that developers can include in a package to be run before installation, after installation, before removal, or after removal of the package.

/var/lib/dpkg/available

Contains information about packages available on the system.

/var/lib/dpkg/status

Contains information about the status of packages available on the system.

/etc/apt/sources.list

A list for APT of package sources, used to locate packages. The sources are listed one per line, in order of preference.

/etc/apt/apt.conf

The main APT configuration file.

/etc/apt/apt_preferences

A preferences file that controls various aspects of APT, such as letting a user select the version or release of a package to install.

/etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg

A configuration file containing default options for dpkg.

For a user, the important file is /etc/apt/sources.list. This file is where you set up the paths to the package archives, telling apt where to go to find packages. apt is installed with a default file. You aren’t required to modify the sources in the file, but you’ll probably want to change some sources, or add additional ones at some ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596100299Errata Page