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Accepted
hsivonen
Asked: 2012-04-06 05:32:48 +0800 CST

How to download the source packages for all installed packages?

  • 772

What apt incantations do I need to use to download the source packages for all the installed packages into a directory? (The use case is GPL compliance when giving an installed Ubuntu system to another person along with a computer.)

apt gpl

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Try this..

    Create a directory where you want the source for all installed packages to be downloaded, and enter it.

    mkdir source; cd source

    Create a file named getsource.sh

    getsource.sh

    #!/bin/bash
dpkg --get-selections | while read line
do
        package=`echo $line | awk '{print $1}'`
        mkdir $package
        cd $package
        apt-get -q source $package
        cd ..
done

    Make it executable.

    chmod a+x getsource.sh

    Execute it..

    ./getsource.sh

    And go grab a cup of coffee :)

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  2. An alternative for you might be to just hand out the source CDs:

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  3. On Ubuntu refer to command:

    apt-get source package-name

    it is recommended that you only use apt-get source as a regular user, because then you can edit files in the source package without needing root privileges.

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  4. There's a couple issues in the accepted answer and with the linked better answer in Unix Stack Exchange. Here's an improved and tested script with comments:

    #!/bin/bash

# ${Source} doesn't always show the source package name, ${source:Package} does.
# Multiple packages can have the same source, sort -u eliminates duplicates.
dpkg-query -f '${source:Package}\n' -W | sort -u | while read p; do
    mkdir -p $p
    pushd $p

    # -qq very quiet, pushd provides cleaner progress.
    # -d download compressed sources only, do not extract.
    apt-get -qq -d source $p

    popd
done

    Run as non-root user (_apt works). Note any errors as they may indicate packages with no sources available. You may want to run the script with 2>err.log to parse these manually later.

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