APT – Difference Between APT Upgrade Commands in Ubuntu

As others have pointed out, it "follows dselect choices". One nice thing about this, is one can feed a list of packages selections to dpkg:

dpkg --clear-selections
dpkg --set-selections < package_choice_list

then do "apt-get dselect-upgrade" and it will remove anything not in the list, and install everything in the list. I don't think any other package tool can do that. It gives one a way to ensure "these and only these" packages are installed, which is very convenient.

There are 3 decent choices:

1. You could create a script something like the following:

   #!/bin/bash
   set -e
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get upgrade
   sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
   

   Call it something like update.sh and place it in /usr/local/bin and then make the script executable by running:

   sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/update.sh
   

2. Another method would be to create a bash alias (in ~/.bashrc) or wherever you normally store your aliases:

   alias update='sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade'
   

3. A final method would be to simply string the 3 commands together on the commandline:

   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
   

A few choices...

Reference:

• Combine apt-get update and apt-get upgrade in one command