1

In the below output, what does automatic mean?

$apt search exfat
Sorting... Done
Full Text Search... Done
exfat-fuse/focal,now 1.3.0-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  read and write exFAT driver for FUSE

exfat-utils/focal,now 1.3.0-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  utilities to create, check, label and dump exFAT filesystem

And in this context are there any similar/other output details to be known about apt (and the apt family tools) output? Any refs will be great.

Edit 1:

In place of automatic, what other values are possible? I have searched:

apt  -qq list | grep installed | grep -v automatic
apt-file/focal,focal,now 3.2.2 all [installed]
aptitude/focal,now 0.8.12-1ubuntu4 amd64 [installed]
base-passwd/focal,now 3.5.47 amd64 [installed]
console-setup/focal,focal,now 1.194ubuntu3 all [installed]
dash/focal,now 0.5.10.2-6 amd64 [installed]
diffutils/focal,now 1:3.7-3 amd64 [installed]

I don't see anything like manual as suggested in the comments. Both apt-file and aptitude were installed manually by me, so shouldn't there be a manual tag for these packages?

Edit 2:

To clarify completely. There is no tag called manual. So it's implicit: if it's not automatic then it has to be inferred as manual.

Olivia Stork
  • 157
samshers
  • 258

1 Answers1

5

Automatic means it was installed as a dependency of another package. If a package is installed as "automatic" and you specifically need to install it, you should still do a "apt install " which marks it as manual. Automatic packages can be cleared out by "apt autoremove" should the parent package be removed.

Brian Turek
  • 1,826