Audience
Professional users seeking a tool to install, build, remove and manage Debian packages
About DPKG
DPKG is a tool to install, build, remove and manage Debian packages. The primary and more user-friendly front-end for DPKG is aptitude. DPKG itself is controlled entirely via command line parameters, which consist of exactly one action and zero or more options. The action parameter tells DPKG what to do and options control the behavior of the action in some way. DPKG can also be used as a front-end to DPKG-deb(1) and DPKG-query. The list of supported actions can be found later on in the actions section. If any such action is encountered DPKG just runs DPKG-deb or DPKG-query with the parameters given to it, but no specific options are currently passed to them, to use any such option the back-ends need to be called directly. DPKG maintains some usable information about available packages. The information is divided into three classes, states, selection states, and flags. These values are intended to be changed mainly with dselect.