Ubuntu package management cheat sheet

Sat Nov 20 2021

Most used commands (copy directly from the man page)

Most used commands:
  list - list packages based on package names
  search - search in package descriptions
  show - show package details
  install - install packages
  reinstall - reinstall packages
  remove - remove packages
  autoremove - Remove automatically all unused packages
  update - update list of available packages
  upgrade - upgrade the system by installing/upgrading packages
  full-upgrade - upgrade the system by removing/installing/upgrading packages
  edit-sources - edit the source information file
  satisfy - satisfy dependency strings

To remove a package

sudo apt remove package-name

To install a package

sudo apt install package-name

List installed packages

apt list --installed

Search an installed package

apt list --installed | grep package-name

To remove mulitple packages using regex wildcard:

sudo apt remove -s '*pattern*'

For example, you want to remove all php related packages on your system, you can do like this:

sudo apt remove -s '*php*'

You’ll see messages like these:

It is because apt tries to remove all packages which match that pattern. Since, for example, conquest-mysql not installed in my system, the remove request for that package is invalid.

However, if there are packages installed on the system, they will be removed.

For example, I tried to remove thunderbird. Since there are packages installed, they were removed:

Cleanup packages that no longer required

There are times you installed a package, some other dependencies are installed too. However, when you remove the package you installed, the dependencies may not be removed. The following command helps cleanup those redundant, left-over packages:

sudo apt autoremove