This document discusses Debian package management commands including aptitude and dpkg. It provides information on using aptitude to update package lists, install packages, remove packages with and without configuration files, and search for packages. It also discusses using dpkg to list files in packages, identify package owning a file, and list installed packages. Additional useful commands like apt-cdrom are also mentioned.

1. These are some Debian specific commands which are used
frequently for completely command line based Debian
package management
Using Aptitude
aptitude update fetches latest package list from
server and updates local package list
aptitude install <package_name> installs package
aptitude remove <package_name> removes package but it's configuration
files
aptitude purge <package_name> removes packages along with it's
configuration files
Using aptitude search
aptitude search <search_pattern>
e.g. aptitude search ~c
~v Virtual Packages
~U Upgradeable Packages
~o Obsolete Packages
~N New Packages
~i Installed Packages
~g Garbage Packages
~c Removed packages with configuration files not removed
~b Broken Packages
~M Automatically Installed Packages
Note : Sometimes “aptitude search <pkg_name>” doesn't yield better results.
One can use “apt-cache search <pkg_name>” in this case.
Using dpkg
dpkg -L <package_name> lists files installed for particular package
dpkg -S <file_name> shows which parent package the file belongs to
e.g.
dpkg -S /bin/ls
dpkg -S $(which ls)
dpkg -S /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
dpkg -l lists all available packages with their state
(installed, not-installed etc)

2. Some more useful commands
apt-cdrom add adds CD / DVD to repository in /etc/apt/sources.list
Note:
* You should have at least following two lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
You can replace "stable" with "testing" or "unstable". For more
information ... just Google it ;)
* Make a habit of running "aptitude update" before installing any package,
which ensures that you get latest updated version