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Gareth
Asked: 2009-05-12 17:17:00 +0800 CST

Aptitude / apt-get. Any way to only show non-X dependant apps in a search?

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It just occured to me that it would be good to do an 'aptitude search blah' and only have non-graphical applications shown.

I know it's not a biggy but the docs don't seem to mention it and I would find it useful to know.

Thanks.

linux debian apt aptitude

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    aptitude search \!~Dlibgtk2.0-0

    That will search for all packages that don't depend on libgtk2.0-0, but probably you want to look for a way to recursively search for non-dependencies and look for an X library that all graphical programs depend on.

    I hope that gets you started. Here's more info on aptitude's search terms.

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  2. This kind of classification is done by Debtags and you can use aptitude to search packages based on debtags. You can exclude all packages tagged interface::x11 by doing:

    aptitude search \!~Ginterface::x11

    But instead of excluding X11 apps, you can be more specific, you can look for text based interface only:

    aptitude search ~Ginterface::text-mode

    Or web-based interface with interface::web. And you can mix that with all other search features of aptitude.

    You can also do this search on the web by selecting/excluding more and more tags until you have a small set of packages that you can inspect more closely.

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