%aptent; %aptverbatiment; %aptvendor; ]> &apt-author.jgunthorpe; &apt-author.team; &apt-email; &apt-product; 2019-08-15T00:00:00Z apt-patterns 7 APT apt-patterns Syntax and semantics of apt search patterns Starting with version 2.0, APT provides support for patterns, which can be used to query the apt cache for packages. These patterns provide the basic means to combine other patterns into more complex expressions, as well as ?true and ?false patterns. ?and(PATTERN, PATTERN, ...) Selects objects where all specified patterns match. ?false Selects nothing. ?not(PATTERN) Selects objects where PATTERN does not match. ?or(PATTERN, PATTERN, ...) Selects objects where at least one of the specified patterns match. ?true Selects all objects. These patterns select specific packages. ?architecture(WILDCARD) Selects packages matching the specified architecture, which may contain wildcards using any. ?automatic Selects packages that were installed automatically. ?broken Selects packages that have broken dependencies. ?config-files Selects packages that are not fully installed, but have solely residual configuration files left. ?essential Selects packages that have Essential: yes set in their control file. ?garbage Selects packages that can be removed automatically. ?installed Selects packages that are currently installed. ?name(REGEX) Selects packages where the name matches the given regular expression. ?obsolete Selects packages that no longer exist in repositories. ?upgradable Selects packages that can be upgraded (have a newer candidate). apt remove ?garbage Remove all packages that are automatically installed and no longer needed - same as apt autoremove apt purge ?config-files Purge all packages that only have configuration files left Patterns in apt are heavily inspired by patterns in aptitude, but with some tweaks: Only long forms — the ones starting with ? — are supported Syntax is uniform: If there is an opening parenthesis after a term, it is always assumed to be the beginning of an argument list. In aptitude, a syntactic form "?foo(bar)" could mean "?and(?foo,bar)" if foo does not take an argument. In APT, this will cause an error. Not all patterns are supported. Some additional patterns are available, for example, for finding gstreamer codecs. Escaping terms with ~ is not supported. A trailing comma is allowed in argument lists &apt-get;, &apt; &manbugs; &manauthor;