What is dpkg in ubuntu

Learn more. What is dpkg for? Ask Question. Asked 9 years, 3 months ago. Active 6 years, 2 months ago. Viewed 50k times. My question is simple -- I want to know more about dpkg -- what does it do? Improve this question. This has been edited at least twice to improve clarity -- as it stands it might be worth keeping open provided it isn't a duplicate because it has generated at least one good answer. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. So basically it's apt-get without dependency resolving, and it's used to install.

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Ubuntu Previous Next. If the architecture is currently in use in the database then the operation will be refused, except if --force-architecture is specified. There are two groups of operators, which differ in how they treat an empty ver1 or ver2.

These treat an empty version as earlier than any version: lt le eq ne ge gt. These treat an empty version as later than any version: lt-nl le-nl ge-nl gt-nl. List packages matching given pattern. Report status of specified package. List files installed to your system from package-name. Search for a filename from installed packages. Users of APT-based frontends should use apt-cache show package-name instead. Each line in the configuration file is either an option exactly the same as the command line option but without leading hyphens or a comment if it starts with a.

The default is Specifying this option will cause automatic deconfiguration of the package which depended on the removed package. Warning: These options are mostly intended to be used by experts only. Using them without fully understanding their effects may break your whole system. Warning: At present dpkg does not do any dependency checking on downgrades and therefore will not warn you if the downgrade breaks the dependency of some other package.

This can have serious side effects, downgrading essential system components can even make your whole system unusable. Use with care. This may, for example, cause parts of the package to remain on the system, which will then be forgotten by dpkg. Essential packages contain mostly very basic Unix commands. Removing them might cause the whole system to stop working, so use with caution. This is dangerous, for it will usually cause overwriting of some files. This is dangerous, since it means not preserving a change removing made to the file.

If there is no default action it will stop to ask the user unless --force-confnew or --force-confold is also been given, in which case it will use that to decide the final action. If any of --force-confmiss , --force-confnew , --force-confold , or --force-confdef is also given, it will be used to decide the final action. Note : For ext4, the main offender, consider using instead the mount option nodelalloc , which will fix both the performance degradation and the data safety issues, the latter by making the file system not produce zero-length files on abrupt system crashes with any software not doing syncs before atomic renames.

Warning: Using this option might improve performance at the cost of losing data, use with care. Ignore dependency-checking for specified packages actually, checking is performed, but only warnings about conflicts are given, nothing else. This is used to see what would happen with the specified action, without actually modifying anything. Be sure to give --no-act before the action-parameter, or you might end up with undesirable results. The two interfaces in fact work together, with APT acting like a complete package management tool through the use of dpkg.

When APT or its cousin, Apt-get installs a package, it's actually using dpkg on the back-end to accomplish that. In that way, dpkg acts more as an "under the hood" tool for APT's more user-friendly interface. With APT, you can retrieve a file from a remote repository and install it, all in one command.

This saves you from the work of manually finding and downloading the package before installation. With dpkg, you can only install local files you've already downloaded yourself. It can't search remote repositories or pull packages from them. When you install a package with dpkg, that's all that will happen: the system will simply install the package. Some packages, however, need additional software called dependencies in order to operate.