Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

Name

dselect

Synopsis

dselect [options] [action]

A screen-oriented user frontend to dpkg. One of the primary user interfaces for installing and managing packages. See dpkg and dpkg-deb for information on building packages.

Actions

If dselect is run with no action specified on the command line, it displays the following menu:

 * 0. [A]ccess   Choose the access method to use.
   1. [U]pdate   Update list of available packages, if
                 possible.
   2. [S]elect   Request which packages you want on your
                 system.
   3. [I]nstall  Install and upgrade wanted packages.
   4. [C]onfig   Configure any packages that are
                 unconfigured.
   5. [R]emove   Remove unwanted software.
   6. [Q]uit     Quit dselect.

The asterisk (on the first line) shows the currently selected option. Any of the menu items can be specified directly on the command line as an action (access, update, select, install, config, remove, quit) to go directly to the desired activity. For example:

dselect access

If you enter quit on the command line, dselect exits immediately without doing anything. An additional command-line action is menu, which displays the menu and is equivalent to running dselect with no action.

Options

Options can be specified both on the command line and in the dselect configuration file, /etc/dpkg/dselect.cfg.

--admindir dir

Change the directory that holds internal data files to dir. Default is /var/lib/dpkg.

--colorcolorspec, --colourcolorspec

Set colors for different parts of the screen, as specified by colorspec as follows:

screenpart:[fgcolor],[bgcolor ...