I'm trying to automate my setup as much as possible.
To do this I have lists of packages that I want to install, for example: banshee wireshark audacity thunderbird thunderbird-lightning calibre deluge unison-gtk usb-creator-kde ding digikam chromium-browser bleachbit soundconverter kdenlive firefox-kde-support vlc kwrite openjdk-6-jre icedtea6-plugin virtualbox virtualbox-guest-additions-iso.
I want to write a small bash script to call apt-get to install these packages only if they're not already installed.
Currently I have this but it doesn't work:
dpkg -s "$1" > /dev/null 2>&1 || apt-get -y install "$1"
, (where $1 is the list)
Best Answer
apt-get will fairly silently skip over any package that is installed already so I'm not sure why it needs to get special treatment? ie:
Is there a particular reason this won't work for you as-is?