Difference between apt and apt-get
 

Hi everyone,
I'd like to know why there is the 'apt-get' and 'apt' command. They seem to do the exact same things, however 'man apt' tells me that 'apt-get' has a few more features.
Why are there two versions of apt?

Thank you!

I don't think there is an apt command. There's certainly none on my system except for the one used by java. So the simple answer is that there are not two versions of apt. On the command line use aptitude or apt-get for managing packages.
jdk (not java)

APT is not a command itself, but it is a package management system. Several package managers can use this package management system, for example apt-get, aptitude, Synaptic or the Software Center. It just appears that the authors of apt-get have implemented more command-line options than the authors of aptitude (which in opposition to apt-get comes with an interactive user-interface) or Synaptic (which is designed for graphical usage).
So in general, there is only one version of APT, but it is used by different frontends, each with a different approach and therefore catering to different users. I personally just use apt-get because I am used to it, I also could run aptitude (it does even understand the same command-line options), just use what you prefer.

when i first started using linux, with the habbit of a windows user, i like to use Synaptics. But afterwards i felt more comfartable with tools like apt-cache [search|show], dpkg and apt-get.

One of the reason is that i try to keep track of my system modifications. for example if i install a new package i took outputs of some of the commands mentioned above and put them in a log file that i create.

So i think all is about preferences and being comfartable.

@jdkaye Maybe it's because of your distro, I do have this command though.
@TobiSGD Ah, so apt-get is dependent on apt. I thought apt-get was apt itself and not a frontend for it. Thanks!
@climaxnix I use the command line for the same reason. It unsettled me when I found out about the two commands, I wanted to know the tools I'm using.

My distro is Debian, which is what I thought you were using.
Out of curiosity, can you post the path to the "apt" command. Do you happen to know what package contains the "apt" command?
I did find an executable called "apt" in /etc/cron.daily/. Maybe that's what you mean. It's not really meant to be used from the command line however.
jdk

That's weird because mine is based on Debian. The path is /usr/local/bin/apt. Unfortunately I don't know the package and apt-file returned way too much.

Aha! /usr/local/bin is the typical location of things you have compiled from source yourself. Perhaps the source code lacked the "-get" after the "apt" when creating the executable. In any event that is not the typical location for such system executables. You generally find them in /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /bin, or /sbin.
jdk

If you give apt-file the exact path it should only come up with packages really containing that binary.

Well I'm pretty sure I didn't compile anything from source yet at all because I just installed this system like three days ago. Also apt doesn't seem like something you'd manually install after the installation, it's too important.
I guess it's like TobiSGD said, apt-get is a frontend for apt.
The description from 'man apt' seems to agree with that:
It's weird apt is in /usr/local/bin/apt and apt-get in /usr/bin/apt-get then though.

'apt-file find /usr/local/bin/apt'
gives me nothing.

EDIT: Wait a moment, didn't update...
EDIT2: Takes longer to search, but still returns nothing.

When I say that apt-get (and others) is a frontend for APT (the Advanced Packaging Tool) that doesn't mean that there exists a program apt somewhere that is used by apt-get. APT is more of a protocol that is used by different programs through the libapt-pkg library. On a normal Debian system there is no program called apt, especially not in /usr/local, which shouldn't be used by Debian packages at all. May it be that you have installed a custom package from a third party source?

I just had a play in a VM with a live DVD of Ubuntu 13.04 Beta (the most recent I have) and it doesn't have an executable called apt but on the Linux Mint 13 live DVD (again, the latest I have) there is, indeed, an executable /usr/bin/apt that is a wrapper script in Python for apt-get. It belongs to the mintsystem package, apparently.

Thanks! This seems to be the solution. I tried what happened if I uninstalled it and it seems to match with what you found out.

Thanks for posing the question -- I like to find out these little differences in the distributions.