On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Kussh Singh kussh.singh@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all
Is there any easy way to get the description of all packages listed in a file which contains the names of all such packages?
eg. i used sudo dpkg --get-selections >installed-software
to make a list of all installed software packages on my system However I want to remove some of them in batch mode (from the command line) instead of by using synaptic and deleting them one by one which is a cumbersome process. So the description of such packages is needed in another file containing a subset of names of packages likely to be removed.
How can this be done ?
From your description, I haven't understood your requirement very well.
Though I suspect you might be looking at something like this:
dpkg --get-selections | sed -es'![ \t]+.+$!!' | tee /var/tmp/installed-software | xargs apt-cache depends
/var/tmp/software-dpendencies
It lists down all the dependencies/suggestions/conflicts of packages installed on your system. If you just want to find out dependencies of few select packages you want to remove, then put their names (one per line) in a file, (say packages-to-remove) and run the following:
cat packages-to-remove | xargs apt-cache depends >/var/tmp/pkg-dpendencies
Raghu