Command Center

Command line package administration can be powerful but it’s not obvious at first glance.
The commands to list, install, upgrade and uninstall are not using the same shell command.
Sometime you need apt-get, sometimes apt-cache, sometimes dpkg,… not very consistent.

Some commands are also confusing, for instance:

will install only the phpmyadmin package.
However this one:

or this one:

are exactly the same and will attempt to upgrade ALL your packages, and not a specific one.

apt-get upgrade should probably give an error that is has an extra argument instead, otherwise you think you’re just upgrading one package.

Worse: you need to reuse the apt-get “install” command to upgrade a specific package, which makes the “upgrade” keyword confusing.

This cheat sheet is also valid for Debian systems as Ubuntu is based on Debian.
It is presented in a chronological manner for the lifetime of a package: searching, getting more details, installing, upgrading, removing.

Here is a quick cheat sheet summary:

sudo apt-get update # Update the local repository to have all the latest available packages
apt-cache search phpmyadmin # Search by keyword for a package
apt-cache show phpmyadmin # Get more information about a specific package before installing it
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin # Install a specific package
dpkg -L phpmyadmin # List the files installed by a specific package
dpkg -l # List ALL installed packages
sudo apt-get install # Upgrade a package to the latest available version
apt-get upgrade # Upgrade ALL installed packages
sudo apt-get remove phpmyadmin # Uninstall, Remove, Delete, Suppress, Deinstall a specific package

And here are what the commands return in detail: