How to download a package and its dependencies with aptitude?

Question

I am trying to download some debian packages and their dependencies in a directory.

I tried using the command aptitude download <package_name> it downloaded the package without its dependencies.

How do I tell it to download the dependencies too?

Solution 1

You can use apt-rdepends to build the complete set of dependencies (recursively), including the main package, then download that:

apt-get download $(apt-rdepends "${package}" | grep -v ^\ )

(replacing "${package}" of course).

Solution 2

A rather hackish way to do that is to have another utility (apt-cache in this example) list the package's dependencies:

# PACKAGE=nautilus; aptitude download $PACKAGE $(apt-cache depends "$PACKAGE" | grep Depends | awk -F ': ' '{print $NF}' | xargs)

Comments

[Andrey Regentov]

that's great, and it places a bunch of .debs into the current directory. But it can give errors like E: Can't select candidate version from package c-compiler as it has no candidate when there are virtual packages in the list.

[Stephen Kitt]

That’s a good point, thanks for raising it; apt-repends also suffers from listing alternatives equally (for example, cargo is listed as depending on gcc, clang and c-compiler).