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Accepted
James Mitch
Asked: 2013-02-09 05:23:10 +0800 CST

apt-get mass install packages from a file?

  • 772

I have a text file with lots of package names.

package1
package2

# comment
# installing package3 because it was needed for...
package 3

package 4

How can I mass install all packages inside the text file without removing the comments?

apt

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Something along these lines ought to do the trick.

    apt-get install $(grep -vE "^\s*#" filename  | tr "\n" " ")

    The $(something) construction runs the something command, inserting its output in the command line.

    The grep command will exclude any line beginning with a #, optionally allowing for whitespace before it. Then the tr command replaces newlines with spaces.

    • 51

  2. The following command is a (slight) improvement over the alternative because sudo apt-get install is not executed when the package list is empty.

    xargs -a <(awk '! /^ *(#|$)/' "$packagelist") -r -- sudo apt-get install

    Note that the -a option reads items directly from a file instead of standard input. We don't want to pipe a file into xargs because stdin must remain unchanged for use by apt-get.

    • 19

  3. Given a package list file package.list, try:

    sudo apt-get install $(awk '{print $1'} package.list)
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  4. I use this simple solution:

    grep -vE '^#' file.txt | xargs sudo apt install -y

    grep finds all lines that don't start with a # and gives them as arguments to sudo apt install.

    • 3

  5. Inspired by the accepted answer here and this answer on removing comments:

        apt-get install $(grep -o '^[^#]*' filename)
    • 2

  6. Well, here's my solution to install a list of packages I have for fresh install:

    sudo apt install -y $(grep -o ^[^#][[:alnum:]-]* "filename")

    In a bash function :

    aptif () {
    sudo apt install -y $(grep -o ^[^#][[:alnum:]-]* "$1")
}

    grep explanation :

    • -o keep only the part of line that matches the expression
    • ^[^#] anything that does not start with a #
    • [[:alnum]-]* a sequence of letters, numbers and -
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