Re: How download packages from a list

did you try:

cat mylist.txt | xargs apt -d install

read the man page for xargs carefully.  I am assuming that the names in your 
file are proper package names, which never include spaces in their names.

xargs will take a stream of names on its stdin (commonly filenames, not
necessarily) and appends that as space separated "words" to a command prefix.
It will command lines that are within the limits of how long a command line
can be and will execute the command multiple times with a fresh set of
arguments as needed to completely process all of the items in the imput
stream.

xargs is a useful command to allow any command that takes a list of command 
line arguments to also take those arguemnts from stdin.

At Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:14:40 +0200 Hans <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> Dear list,
> 
> for my own purposes I need a bunch of packages from 32-bit bookworm. 
> 
> Is there an easy way, to download them, instead of download the whole 
> repository with rsync?
> 
> I need normal *.deb and *.udeb files and my list is rather long, so that I 
> would automate this. I tried
> 
> apt -d install < mylist.txt 
> 
> but this did not work.
> 
> My list is a asci textfile and its entries are looking so:
> 
> ---- snip ----
> 
> cdrom-detect
> cebconf-udeb
> di-utils
> libglib2.0-udeb
> ....
> ....
> and so on.
> 
> You see, there is a mix of udeb and deb files.
> 
> I would be happy, if these could be downloaded in one step, if possible. 
> On the other hand, if this is not possible at all, so please drop me a note.
> 
> Thank you very much for your help.
> 
> Best regards
> 
> Hans 
> 
> 
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>