@cas ah, that's a good point, I hadn't noticed that this was what the question was about

I don't think apt-clone works for this

but dpkg --get-selection will get you into trouble as well, since there are a few packages that have different names on different architectures

not a big deal - a few packages can be dealt with manually.

installing only the manually-selected packages should mostly take care of that, in addition to preserving the set of manually-installed packages

though if you only do that you might get pretty different sets of recommended packages

i don't think --get-selections distinguishes between manually selected and auto-selected.

no, it doesn't, that's in apt, not in dpkg

I posted a 10-year-old script as an answer to a question by Stéphane

so, other than apt-clone, is there a way to get a list of manually selected packages? grep -v '^lib' is too simple (because of all the lib*-perl etc packages)

not sure if it's exactly what he's after (he didn't describe his use case), but it's served me well

@cas apt-mark showmanual

or an aptitude search, but it's more cumbersome

so, maybe a combination of apt-mark showmanual and dpkg --get-selections '*' | grep -v 'install$' would do the job.

(apt-mark showmanual | awk '{print $0,"install"}' ; dpkg --get-selections '*' | grep -v '[^e]install$') > packages.list

Hmmm, I voted to close unix.stackexchange.com/questions/244980/… as a duplicate of unix.stackexchange.com/questions/40463/… but @terdon's answer is likely to be better than what was on the old questions, if he removes apt-clone (sorry) and mentions apt-mark in addition to dpkg --set-selections

@FaheemMitha if it's capped, I have been unable to reach it due other restrictions on other services (which are also expensive and flaky)

like electricity: not only expensive but unreliable

Shog on voting on correct yet wrong answers meta.stackoverflow.com/a/310950/792066

@Braiam Don't you know if there is a cap?

It should be stated somewhere. On a web page or on your bill.

Yes, expensive and unreliable sounds like India, though prices have dropped recently, and speed and allowed bandwidth has gone up. Not sure why.

A few years ago the service used to be really terrible. Maybe they have improved the network/cabling whatever. Even in India, things change. And companies need reasonable infrastructure to work.

@FaheemMitha hahahahahahaha, no...

@Gilles Yeah, my answer is useful, if it works. Could you and/or @cas have a look at the latest version? I don't know what I'm supposed to do with apt-mark.

@terdon to mark automatic installed packages?

Yes, but why would I want to do that when attempting to replicate the installed packages list on a new system? Have a look at the answer I linked to above. Any suggestions?

you also want to replicate the relationship of the installed packages too, since all packages will be marked as "manually installed", that means that if I remove a meta package, the dependencies will not be removed along with it

Ah, so that's where apt-mark comes in?

How would I do that @Braiam?

apt-mark showauto

@Braiam I'm not on a Debian system at the moment, so I can't check these. Could you be more specific? What does that do? Should I save its output somewhere? Does it have output? When should it be run? Before the get-selections? After it? On the old system or the new (old, I guess)

> showauto - Print the list of automatically installed packages

@terdon edited

@Gilles Thanks

I'm not completely sure when the right time to run apt-mark auto is at restore time

Think it's worth merging the Qs?

maybe

they're about different versions but there hasn't been a significant change since multiarch, and the earlier question was already post-multiarch

I'm a bit nitpicky about the "upgrading to 64-bits" part, since doing both operations at the same time is sure to end badly

@Braiam I think he just means switching. Anyway, questions merged. I think it's better to have it all in one place.

@Braiam Ok. Sounds like the Dominican Republic is even more fun than India.

Wow, I just ran cp . lfs-objects (on purpose), and it actually did what I wanted.

for some reason, all the results that come up are about a Life for Speed game (engine?)...

@derobert Is that surprising?

@Braiam working around a gitlab bug

@FaheemMitha yes, because I typed it wrong in chat (left out the -a) and also because it's copying a directory to a subdirectory of itself...

@derobert oh

@don_crissti I closed it as a dupe. If it isn't, the OP can edit and show us why. Thanks for bringing it up. It would be better if you could flag or ping me here next time though, so we don't leave comments lying about.

earlier I was complaining about wrong answers getting all the upvotes on progse, but we have the same problem here — obviously wrong answer with 9 upvotes and accepted!

(it might not be obvious that the answer is wrong if you just read it, but it can be tested easily)

@terdon - roger that; thanks again !

@don_crissti Man, you'd think they'd at least change the numbers before posting the same assignment. Idiots.

@Gilles what about the other ways of escaping aliases? You said that quotes don't work (I wasn't sure, which is why I said try) but will \foo work?

@terdon - yeah, check here the other one as I've managed to find it via browser history: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/245035

@don_crissti I saw it, I can see deleted questions from the user's profile.

Great answer on the first one, by the way.

@terdon Quotes of any kind (\foo, 'foo', ''foo, etc.) prevent alias expansion. They have no influence on command lookup (the part that determines whether to execute a function, builtin or executable).

Huh. I didn't realize that aliases were so separate. OK, thanks.

Alias expansion is only performed on a plain word. It isn't performed on something like $(echo foo) either, but $(echo foo) is indistinguishable from foo when it's time to check functions and builtins.