Finding Out Package Dependencies With apt-rdepends On Debian/Ubuntu

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Sometimes you need to find out all the dependencies of a package. This tutorial explains how to use apt-rdepends to recursively list all dependencies of a Debian/Ubuntu package.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Installing apt-rdepends

apt-rdepends can be installed as follows:

apt-get install apt-rdepends

If you are on Ubuntu and are not logged in as root, use

sudo apt-get install apt-rdepends

instead.

 

2 Using apt-rdepends

apt-rdepends can be used as follows:

apt-rdepends <packagename>

For example, to find out all dependencies of the package wget, run:

apt-rdepends wget

This is a sample output:

falko@falko-virtual-machine:~$ apt-rdepends wget
 Reading package lists... Done
 Building dependency tree
 Reading state information... Done
 wget
   Depends: dpkg (>= 1.15.4)
   Depends: install-info
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.11)
   Depends: libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.0)
 dpkg
   PreDepends: coreutils (>= 5.93-1)
   PreDepends: libbz2-1.0
   PreDepends: libc6 (>= 2.11)
   PreDepends: libselinux1 (>= 1.32)
   PreDepends: xz-utils
   PreDepends: zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4)
 coreutils
   PreDepends: libacl1 (>= 2.2.11-1)
   PreDepends: libattr1 (>= 2.4.41-1)
   PreDepends: libc6 (>= 2.7)
   PreDepends: libselinux1 (>= 1.32)
 libacl1
   Depends: libattr1 (>= 2.4.41-1)
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
   PreDepends: multiarch-support
 libattr1
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
   PreDepends: multiarch-support
 libc6
   Depends: libc-bin (= 2.13-20ubuntu5)
   Depends: libgcc1
   Depends: tzdata
 libc-bin
 libgcc1
   Depends: gcc-4.6-base (= 4.6.1-9ubuntu3)
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.5)
   PreDepends: multiarch-support
 gcc-4.6-base
 multiarch-support
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.6-2)
 tzdata
   Depends: debconf (>= 0.5)
   Depends: debconf-2.0
 debconf
   PreDepends: perl-base (>= 5.6.1-4)
 perl-base
   PreDepends: dpkg (>= 1.14.20)
   PreDepends: libc6 (>= 2.11)
 debconf-2.0
 libselinux1
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.8)
   PreDepends: multiarch-support
 libbz2-1.0
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
 xz-utils
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7)
   Depends: liblzma2 (>= 5.0.0)
 liblzma2
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
 zlib1g
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
   PreDepends: multiarch-support
 install-info
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
 libssl1.0.0
   Depends: debconf (>= 0.5)
   Depends: debconf-2.0
   Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7)
   Depends: zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4)
   PreDepends: multiarch-support
 falko@falko-virtual-machine:~$

For most packages, the output is even longer and might not fit on your screen. In these cases you can pipe the output into more (or less), e.g. as follows:

apt-rdepends apache2 | more
apt-rdepends apache2 | less

 

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