First off hello.. i just joined and looking forward to perusing this forum for quite some time. I myself an a newbie at linux but look forward to it.


Question: I am creating a fresh install of Debian etch lets call this debian2. my company has another computer running debian etch as well lets call it debian 1. I use dpkg -l to get the list of all programs installed in debian 1 and debian 2. i then place those files in a folder together and run :diff -b debian1 debian2 > diff.list

Ok so that diff.list shows many many programs missing on the debian 2 fresh install that is on the debian1 old install. Which makes sense. I want to make sure that debian2 fresh install has all of the same programs installed onto it as debian 1.

Now.. here is where i am trying to get creative. Because the diff.list shows so many programs that needs to be installed to debian2. I dont want to sit here and type every single program :apt-get install <name of program>. I could do that.. but this is linux there is always another way to do this.

My ideal is : apt-get install <name of list that has all the programs i want it to install>

So to sum it up.. is this possible for apt-get? When i did man apt-get i didnt see anything from what i was describing above except --diff-only but i think this is something else entirely.

Hope i get some reply's.

Have a look at dselect, and the --get-selections option. That might help..here's an example of how you may use it.

Thank you so much.. that was exactly what i was looking for.