To select a particular version of the package, append “=<version>” to the package name: for instance, “aptitude install apt=0.3.1”. Similarly, to select a package from a particular archive, append “/<archive>” to the package name: for instance, “aptitude install apt/experimental”. You cannot specify both an archive and a version for a package.

Not every package listed on the command line has to be installed; you can tell aptitude to do something different with a package by appending an “override specifier” to the name of the package. For example, aptitude remove wesnoth+ will install wesnoth, not remove it. The following override specifiers are available:

<package>+

<package>+M

<package>-

<package>_

<package>=

<package>:

<package>&M

<package>&m

<package>&BD

As a special case, “install” with no arguments will act on any stored/pending actions.

For instance, “aptitude remove '~ndeity'” will remove all packages whose name contains “deity”.

If the command-line parameter --arch-only is present, only architecture-dependent build dependencies (i.e., not Build-Depends-Indep or Build-Conflicts-Indep) will be obeyed.

For more information on automatically installed packages, see the section “Managing Automatically Installed Packages” in the aptitude reference manual.

The difference between hold and keep is that hold will cause a package to be ignored by future safe-upgrade or full-upgrade commands, while keep merely cancels any scheduled actions on the package. unhold will allow a package to be upgraded by future safe-upgrade or full-upgrade commands, without otherwise altering its state.

This command accepts package names or patterns as arguments. If the string contains a tilde character (“~”) or a question mark (“?”), it will be treated as a search pattern and every package matching the pattern will be considered (see the section “Search Patterns” in the aptitude reference manual).

By default, aptitude will select the forbidden version to be the one which the package would normally be upgraded (the candidate version). This may be overridden by appending “=<version>” to the package name: for instance, “aptitude forbid-version vim=1.2.3.broken-4”.

To revert the action, “aptitude install <package>” will remove the ban. To remove the forbidden version without installing the candidate version, the current version should be appended: “install <package>=<version>”.

If no <package>s are listed on the command line, aptitude will attempt to upgrade every package that can be upgraded. Otherwise, aptitude will attempt to upgrade only the packages which it is instructed to upgrade. The <package>s can be extended with suffixes in the same manner as arguments to aptitude install, so you can also give additional instructions to aptitude here; for instance, aptitude safe-upgrade bash dash- will attempt to upgrade the bash package and remove the dash package.

It is sometimes necessary to remove one package in order to upgrade another; this command is not able to upgrade packages in such situations. Use the full-upgrade command to upgrade as many packages as possible.

If no <package>s are listed on the command line, aptitude will attempt to upgrade every package that can be upgraded. Otherwise, aptitude will attempt to upgrade only the packages which it is instructed to upgrade. The <package>s can be extended with suffixes in the same manner as arguments to aptitude install, so you can also give additional instructions to aptitude here; for instance, aptitude full-upgrade bash dash- will attempt to upgrade the bash package and remove the dash package.

i   apt                             - Advanced front-end for dpkg
pi  apt-build                       - frontend to apt to build, optimize and in
cp  apt-file                        - APT package searching utility -- command-
ihA raptor-utils                    - Raptor RDF Parser utilities

Each search result is listed on a separate line. The first character of each line indicates the current state of the package: the most common states are p, meaning that no trace of the package exists on the system, c, meaning that the package was deleted but its configuration files remain on the system, i, meaning that the package is installed, and v, meaning that the package is virtual. The second character indicates the stored action (if any; otherwise a blank space is displayed) to be performed on the package, with the most common actions being i, meaning that the package will be installed, d, meaning that the package will be deleted, and p, meaning that the package and its configuration files will be removed. If the third character is A, the package was automatically installed.

For a complete list of the possible state and action flags, see the section “Accessing Package Information” in the aptitude reference guide. To customize the output of search, see the command-line options -F and --sort.

If the verbosity level is 1 or greater (i.e., at least one -v is present on the command-line), information about all versions of the package is displayed. Otherwise, information about the “candidate version” (the version that “aptitude install” would download) is displayed.

You can display information about a different version of the package by appending =<version> to the package name; you can display the version from a particular archive or release by appending /<archive> or /<release> to the package name: for instance, /unstable or /sid. If either of these is present, then only the version you request will be displayed, regardless of the verbosity level.

If the verbosity level is 1 or greater, the package's architecture, compressed size, filename, and md5sum fields will be displayed. If the verbosity level is 2 or greater, the select version or versions will be displayed once for each archive in which they are found.

This is a thin wrapper over apt(8).

This is a thin wrapper over apt(8).

$ aptitude versions wesnoth
p   1:1.4.5-1                                                             100
p   1:1.6.5-1                                    unstable                 500
p   1:1.7.14-1                                   experimental             1

Each version is listed on a separate line. The leftmost three characters indicate the current state, planned state (if any), and whether the package was automatically installed; for more information on their meanings, see the documentation of aptitude search. To the right of the version number you can find the releases from which the version is available, and the pin priority of the version.

If a package name contains a tilde character (“~”) or a question mark (“?”), it will be treated as a search pattern and all matching versions will be displayed (see the section “Search Patterns” in the aptitude reference manual). This means that, for instance, aptitude versions '~i' will display all the versions that are currently installed on the system and nothing else, not even other versions of the same packages.

$ aptitude versions '~nexim4-daemon-light'
Package exim4-daemon-light:
i   4.71-3                                                                100
p   4.71-4                                       unstable                 500
Package exim4-daemon-light-dbg:
p   4.71-4                                       unstable                 500

If the input is a search pattern, or if more than one package's versions are to be displayed, aptitude will automatically group the output by package, as shown above. You can disable this via --group-by=none, in which case aptitude will display a single list of all the versions that were found and automatically include the package name in each output line:

$ aptitude versions --group-by=none '~nexim4-daemon-light'
i   exim4-daemon-light 4.71-3                                             100
p   exim4-daemon-light 4.71-4                    unstable                 500
p   exim4-daemon-light-dbg 4.71-4                unstable                 500

To disable the package name, pass --show-package-names=never:

$ aptitude versions --show-package-names=never --group-by=none '~nexim4-daemon-light'
i   4.71-3                                                                100
p   4.71-4                                       unstable                 500
p   4.71-4                                       unstable                 500

In addition to the above options, the information printed for each version can be controlled by the command-line option -F. The order in which versions are displayed can be controlled by the command-line option --sort. To prevent aptitude from formatting the output into columns, use --disable-columns.

User tags are arbitrary strings associated with a package. They can be used with the ?user-tag(<tag>) search term, which will select all the packages that have a user tag matching <tag>.

This command searches for packages that require or conflict with the given package. It displays a sequence of dependencies leading to the target package, along with a note indicating the installed state of each package in the dependency chain:

$ aptitude why kdepim
i   nautilus-data Recommends nautilus
i A nautilus      Recommends desktop-base (>= 0.2)
i A desktop-base  Suggests   gnome | kde | xfce4 | wmaker
p   kde           Depends    kdepim (>= 4:3.4.3)

The command why finds a dependency chain that installs the package named on the command line, as above. Note that the dependency that aptitude produced in this case is only a suggestion. This is because no package currently installed on this computer depends on or recommends the kdepim package; if a stronger dependency were available, aptitude would have displayed it.

In contrast, why-not finds a dependency chain leading to a conflict with the target package:

$ aptitude why-not textopo
i   ocaml-core          Depends   ocamlweb
i A ocamlweb            Depends   tetex-extra | texlive-latex-extra
i A texlive-latex-extra Conflicts textopo

If one or more <pattern>s are present (in addition to the mandatory last argument, which should be a valid <package> name), then aptitude will begin its search at these patterns. That is, the first package in the chain it prints to explain why <package> is or is not installed, will be a package matching the pattern in question. The patterns are considered to be package names unless they contain a tilde character (“~”) or a question mark (“?”), in which case they are treated as search patterns (see the section “Search Patterns” in the aptitude reference manual).

If no patterns are present, then aptitude will search for dependency chains beginning at manually installed packages. This effectively shows the packages that have caused or would cause a given package to be installed.

If the verbosity level is 1 or more, then all the explanations aptitude can find will be displayed, in inverse order of relevance. If the verbosity level is 2 or more, a truly excessive amount of debugging information will be printed to standard output.

This command returns 0 if successful, 1 if no explanation could be constructed, and -1 if an error occurred.

By default, the changelog for the version which would be installed with “aptitude install” is downloaded. You can select a particular version of a package by appending =<version> to the package name; you can select the version from a particular archive or release by appending /<archive> or /<release> to the package name (for instance, /unstable or /sid).

This is a thin wrapper over apt(8).

Dependencies in binary package stanzas will be rewritten to remove references to packages not in the selected set.

For instance, aptitude safe-upgrade --add-user-tag-to "new-installs,?action(install)" will add the tag new-installs to all the packages installed by the safe-upgrade command.

For instance, the first few lines of output from “aptitude search -F '%p %V' --disable-columns libedataserver” might be:

disksearch 1.2.1-3
hp-search-mac 0.1.3
libbsearch-ruby 1.5-5
libbsearch-ruby1.8 1.5-5
libclass-dbi-abstractsearch-perl 0.07-2
libdbix-fulltextsearch-perl 0.73-10

As in the above example, --disable-columns is often useful in combination with a custom display format set using the command-line option -F.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Disable-Columns.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Deps.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Download-Only.

The command-line option --disable-columns is often useful in combination with -F.

For search, this corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Package-Display-Format; for versions, this corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Version-Display-Format.

This corresponds to the configuration item Aptitude::CmdLine::Fix-Broken.

This option can be used to force the use of the full resolver even when Aptitude::Always-Use-Safe-Resolver is true.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Versions-Group-By.

This does not affect the log of installations that aptitude has performed (/var/log/aptitude); the log messages written using this configuration include internal program events, errors, and debugging messages. See the command-line option --log-level to get more control over what gets logged.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::Logging::File.

--log-level=<category>:<level> causes messages in <category> to only be logged if their level is <level> or higher.

--log-level may appear multiple times on the command line; the most specific setting is the one that takes effect, so if you pass --log-level=aptitude.resolver:fatal and --log-level=aptitude.resolver.hints.match:trace, then messages in aptitude.resolver.hints.parse will only be printed if their level is fatal, but all messages in aptitude.resolver.hints.match will be printed. If you set the level of the same category two or more times, the last setting is the one that will take effect.

This does not affect the log of installations that aptitude has performed (/var/log/aptitude); the log messages written using this configuration include internal program events, errors, and debugging messages. See the command-line option --log-file to change where log messages go.

This corresponds to the configuration group Aptitude::Logging::Levels.

This mimics the historical behavior of apt-get upgrade.

Prepending the order keyword with a tilde character (~) reverses the order from ascending to descending.

The default sort order is name,version.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Always-Prompt.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::Purge-Unused.

The optional =<n> may be used to directly set the amount of quietness (for instance, to override a setting in /etc/apt/apt.conf); it causes the program to behave as if -q had been passed exactly <n> times.

This corresponds to the pair of configuration options APT::Install-Recommends and APT::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant.

This corresponds to the configuration option APT::Install-Recommends

For instance, aptitude safe-upgrade --remove-user-tag-from "not-upgraded,?action(upgrade)" will remove the not-upgraded tag from all packages that the safe-upgrade command is able to upgrade.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::Simulate.

This option is equivalent to setting the configuration variable Aptitude::Always-Use-Safe-Resolver to true.

For instance, aptitude --schedule-only install evolution will schedule the evolution package for later installation.

This option corresponds to the configuration item Aptitude::CmdLine::Versions-Show-Package-Names.

When executing the command safe-upgrade or when the option --safe-resolver is present, aptitude will display a summary of the actions performed by the resolver before printing the installation preview. This is equivalent to the configuration option Aptitude::Safe-Resolver::Show-Resolver-Actions.

<MODE> can be any one of the following:

This option corresponds to the configuration item Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Summary; if --show-summary is present on the command-line, it will override Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Summary.

Example 12. Usage of --show-summary --show-summary used with -v to display all the reasons a package is installed:

$ aptitude -v --show-summary why foomatic-db
Packages requiring foomatic-db:


  cupsys-driver-gutenprint


  foomatic-db-engine


  foomatic-db-gutenprint


  foomatic-db-hpijs


  foomatic-filters-ppds


  foomatic-gui


  kde


  printconf


  wine
$ aptitude -v --show-summary=first-package-and-type why foomatic-db
Packages requiring foomatic-db:


  [Depends] cupsys-driver-gutenprint


  [Depends] foomatic-db-engine


  [Depends] foomatic-db-gutenprint


  [Depends] foomatic-db-hpijs


  [Depends] foomatic-filters-ppds


  [Depends] foomatic-gui


  [Depends] kde


  [Depends] printconf


  [Depends] wine
$ aptitude -v --show-summary=all-packages why foomatic-db
Packages requiring foomatic-db:


  cupsys-driver-gutenprint D: cups-driver-gutenprint D: cups R: foomatic-filters R: foomatic-db-engine D: foomatic-db


  foomatic-filters-ppds D: foomatic-filters R: foomatic-db-engine D: foomatic-db


  kde D: kdeadmin R: system-config-printer-kde D: system-config-printer R: hal-cups-utils D: cups R: foomatic-filters R: foomatic-db-engine D: foomatic-db


  wine D: libwine-print D: cups-bsd R: cups R: foomatic-filters R: foomatic-db-engine D: foomatic-db


  foomatic-db-engine D: foomatic-db


  foomatic-db-gutenprint D: foomatic-db


  foomatic-db-hpijs D: foomatic-db


  foomatic-gui D: python-foomatic D: foomatic-db-engine D: foomatic-db


  printconf D: foomatic-db
$ aptitude -v --show-summary=all-packages-with-dep-versions why foomatic-db
Packages requiring foomatic-db:


  cupsys-driver-gutenprint D: cups-driver-gutenprint (>= 5.0.2-4) D: cups (>= 1.3.0) R: foomatic-filters (>= 4.0) R: foomatic-db-engine (>= 4.0) D: foomatic-db (>= 20090301)


  foomatic-filters-ppds D: foomatic-filters R: foomatic-db-engine (>= 4.0) D: foomatic-db (>= 20090301)


  kde D: kdeadmin (>= 4:3.5.5) R: system-config-printer-kde (>= 4:4.2.2-1) D: system-config-printer (>= 1.0.0) R: hal-cups-utils D: cups R: foomatic-filters (>= 4.0) R: foomatic-db-engine (>= 4.0) D: foomatic-db (>= 20090301)


  wine D: libwine-print (= 1.1.15-1) D: cups-bsd R: cups R: foomatic-filters (>= 4.0) R: foomatic-db-engine (>= 4.0) D: foomatic-db (>= 20090301)


  foomatic-db-engine D: foomatic-db


  foomatic-db-gutenprint D: foomatic-db


  foomatic-db-hpijs D: foomatic-db


  foomatic-gui D: python-foomatic (>= 0.7.9.2) D: foomatic-db-engine D: foomatic-db (>= 20090301)


  printconf D: foomatic-db
	    

--show-summary used to list a chain on one line:

$ aptitude --show-summary=all-packages why aptitude-gtk libglib2.0-data
Packages requiring libglib2.0-data:


  aptitude-gtk D: libglib2.0-0 R: libglib2.0-data

This will affect the default candidate version of packages according to the rules described in apt_preferences(5).

This corresponds to the configuration item APT::Default-Release.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Versions.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Verbose.

$ aptitude --show-why install mediawiki
...
The following NEW packages will be installed:


  libapache2-mod-php5{a} (for mediawiki)  mediawiki  php5{a} (for mediawiki)


  php5-cli{a} (for mediawiki)  php5-common{a} (for mediawiki)


  php5-mysql{a} (for mediawiki)

When combined with -v or a non-zero value for Aptitude::CmdLine::Verbose, this displays the entire chain of dependencies that lead each package to be installed. For instance:

$ aptitude -v --show-why install libdb4.2-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:


  libdb4.2{a} (libdb4.2-dev D: libdb4.2)  libdb4.2-dev
The following packages will be REMOVED:


  libdb4.4-dev{a} (libdb4.2-dev C: libdb-dev P<- libdb-dev)

This option will also describe why packages are being removed, as shown above. In this example, libdb4.2-dev conflicts with libdb-dev, which is provided by libdb-dev.

This argument corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Why and displays the same information that is computed by aptitude why and aptitude why-not.

By default and when the output is seen directly in a terminal, the terminal width is used. When the output is redirected or piped, a very large "unlimited" line width is used, and this option is ignored.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Package-Display-Width

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Assume-Yes.

This corresponds to the configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Size-Changes.