Ubuntu – What does the “apt-get dselect-upgrade” command do

aptcommand line

When running the command apt-get I got all the possible options and commands for apt-get. But one of these commands and definitions I have not seen before:

dselect-upgrade - Follow dselect selections

I ran the command sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade just to see what happened and this was the output:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.

So what does this command actually do? And what does it mean to Follow dselect sections?

Best Answer

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.

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