Recursive dependencies

I can reveal package dependencies like this

apt-cache show wget | grep ^Depends

However I would like to also list the dependencies for the dependencies, so the output would be something like this

wget
  libc6
    libgcc1
      gcc-4.9-base
  libidn11
  libssl1.0.0
    debconf
  libuuid1
    passwd
      libpam0g
      libselinux1
      libsemanage1
      libpam-modules
      debianutils
  zlib1g

This example has a depth of 4 but I would like the actual solution to have full depth.

Sometimes you need to find out all the dependencies of a package. This tutorial explains how to use apt-rdepends to recursively list all dependencies of a Debian/Ubuntu package.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Installing apt-rdepends

apt-rdepends can be installed as follows:

apt-get install apt-rdepends

If you are on Ubuntu and are not logged in as root, use

sudo apt-get install apt-rdepends

instead.

2 Using apt-rdepends

apt-rdepends can be used as follows:

apt-rdepends <packagename>

For example, to find out all dependencies of the package wget, run:

apt-rdepends wget

This is a sample output:

falko@falko-virtual-machine:~$ apt-rdepends wget
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
wget
  Depends: dpkg (>= 1.15.4)
  Depends: install-info
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.11)
  Depends: libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.0)
dpkg
  PreDepends: coreutils (>= 5.93-1)
  PreDepends: libbz2-1.0
  PreDepends: libc6 (>= 2.11)
  PreDepends: libselinux1 (>= 1.32)
  PreDepends: xz-utils
  PreDepends: zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4)
coreutils
  PreDepends: libacl1 (>= 2.2.11-1)
  PreDepends: libattr1 (>= 2.4.41-1)
  PreDepends: libc6 (>= 2.7)
  PreDepends: libselinux1 (>= 1.32)
libacl1
  Depends: libattr1 (>= 2.4.41-1)
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
  PreDepends: multiarch-support
libattr1
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
  PreDepends: multiarch-support
libc6
  Depends: libc-bin (= 2.13-20ubuntu5)
  Depends: libgcc1
  Depends: tzdata
libc-bin
libgcc1
  Depends: gcc-4.6-base (= 4.6.1-9ubuntu3)
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.5)
  PreDepends: multiarch-support
gcc-4.6-base
multiarch-support
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.6-2)
tzdata
  Depends: debconf (>= 0.5)
  Depends: debconf-2.0
debconf
  PreDepends: perl-base (>= 5.6.1-4)
perl-base
  PreDepends: dpkg (>= 1.14.20)
  PreDepends: libc6 (>= 2.11)
debconf-2.0
libselinux1
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.8)
  PreDepends: multiarch-support
libbz2-1.0
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
xz-utils
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7)
  Depends: liblzma2 (>= 5.0.0)
liblzma2
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
zlib1g
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
  PreDepends: multiarch-support
install-info
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4)
libssl1.0.0
  Depends: debconf (>= 0.5)
  Depends: debconf-2.0
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7)
  Depends: zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4)
  PreDepends: multiarch-support
falko@falko-virtual-machine:~$

For most packages, the output is even longer and might not fit on your screen. In these cases you can pipe the output into more (or less), e.g. as follows:

apt-rdepends apache2 | more

apt-rdepends apache2 | less

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