Is there an apt command to download a deb file to the current directory?

Posted by Lekensteyn on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Lekensteyn
Published on 2011-03-15T13:17:25Z Indexed on 2011/03/15 16:19 UTC
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I am often interested in the installation triggers (postinst, postrm) or certain parts (/usr/share or /etc) of packages. Currently, I am running the next command to retrieve the source code:

apt-get source [package-name]

The downside is, this file is often much bigger than the binary package and does not reflect the installation tree.

Right now, I am downloading the packages through http://packages.ubuntu.com/:

  1. Search for [package-name]
  2. Select the package
  3. Click on amd64/i386 for download
  4. Download the actual file

This takes too long for me and as someone who really likes the shell, I would like to do something like the next (imaginary) command:

apt-get get-deb-file [package-name]

I could not find something like this in the apt-get manual page. The most close I found was the --download-only switch, but this puts the package in /var/cache/apt/archives (which requires root permissions) and not in the current directory.

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