Ubuntu – How to use apt-get to only install critical security updates on ubuntu

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How do you use apt-get to only install critical security updates on ubuntu?

We'd like to only upgrade packages that need to be upgraded for security reasons, without upgrading all other packages.

Best Answer

I read the apt-get man page carefully when I got tired of manually editing the sources.list every time I wanted to only apply security updates (that means the second time).

Figured this solution out:

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/security.sources.list

Edit the latter to contain only security repositories, then:

sudo apt-get upgrade -o Dir::Etc::SourceList=/etc/apt/security.sources.list

Tadaaaa... Scriptable stuff.

Related Solutions

How to get the history of “apt-get install” on Ubuntu

The apt history is in /var/log/apt/history.log as said in a comment above. That said, this will not list packages that were installed manually, using dpkg or GUIs such as gdebi. To see all the packages that went through dpkg, you can look at /var/log/dpkg.log.

Ubuntu – How to ask apt-get to skip any interactive post-install configuration steps

You can do a couple of things for avoiding this. Setting the DEBIAN_FRONTEND variable to noninteractive and using -y flag. For example:

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
apt-get -yq install [packagename]

If you need to install it via sudo, use:

sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -yq install [packagename]

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to get the history of “apt-get install” on Ubuntu

Ubuntu – How to ask apt-get to skip any interactive post-install configuration steps

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