Using a file to install packages with apt-get
As specified in the comments of your question, you can build a simple text file, called packages.txt
, listing the packages to install:
iceweasel
terminator
vim
and then run the following command:
cat packages.txt | xargs sudo apt-get install
xargs is used to pass the package names from the packages.txt
file to the command line. From the man page:
xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial- arguments followed by items read from standard input.
Improving a bit on the answer of @ortomala-lokni, you can give the file directly as an argument to xargs
:
xargs -a packages.txt sudo apt-get install
Optionally you can give xargs
the -r
option to prevent the apt-get
call from being run at all if your packages.txt
does not contain any non-whitespace characters.