Find the download location URL,name, size and MD5 sum of a software package using apt-get

Written on January 17th, 2011 at 12:20 pm by shredder12

Debian package management provide with you with immense capabilities. Using the --print-uris options, we can get a lot of useful information about the package, rather than installing it. It tells us about the package download location/URL, name, size and MD5 or SHA sum for archive integrity. Here is an example.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install --print-uris pidgin-themes
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
pidgin-themes
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 8 not upgraded.
Need to get 1,474kB of archives.
After this operation, 4,907kB of additional disk space will be used.
'http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gaim-themes/pidgin-themes_0.2-1_all.deb' pidgin-themes_0.2-1_all.deb 1473898 MD5Sum:203e296d8352a3b80ddaff613aa44ea4

Please note that, this will only work for packages which are not installed. For installed ones, it will simply exit after notifying that the package is already installed.

1 Comment

Anonymous Coward (not verified)

January 17th, 2011 07:54 pm

You could extend your script to work for packages that are already installed by adding the --reinstall flag. By using the -qq flag you can also avoid interactive questions and related clutter. Now we've got something that can be postprocessed easily.