Author: Sahil Suri

Introduction In an earlier article, we demonstrated how you could use the dpkg package manager to install, remove and query information about software packages in the Ubuntu OS. In this article, we will show you how to use apt-cache to search for and query information about packages available in online and local repositories and we will also show you how to use apt-get to install and uninstall packages. Essentially apt-cache is the tool we use to query the apt software cache to obtain information about packages and apt-get is the tool we use for installing packages and modifying the state of packages installed on the system. All the examples demonstrated in this article were performed on an Ubuntu 16.04 system.   APT-CACHE examples   Example 1: List all available packages To list all packages available to be installed, we use the apt-cache pkgnames command as shown below root@linuxnix:~# apt-cache pkgnames libdatrie-doc libfstrcmp0-dbg librime-data-sampheng python-pyao-dbg fonts-georgewilliams python3-aptdaemon.test libcollada2gltfconvert-dev python3-doc8 r-bioc-hypergraph angrydd fonts-linuxlibertine ---------output truncated for brevity Note that this command only shows the package names and no other information about the package. Example 2: Search for a package To search for a package use the apt-cache search command followed by the package name. Let’s search for the nano text editor. root@linuxnix:~# apt-cache search nano nano - small, friendly text editor inspired by Pico alpine-pico - Simple text editor from Alpine,...