did you try: cat mylist.txt | xargs apt -d install
read the man page for xargs carefully. I am assuming that the names in your file are proper package names, which never include spaces in their names. xargs will take a stream of names on its stdin (commonly filenames, not necessarily) and appends that as space separated "words" to a command prefix. It will command lines that are within the limits of how long a command line can be and will execute the command multiple times with a fresh set of arguments as needed to completely process all of the items in the imput stream. xargs is a useful command to allow any command that takes a list of command line arguments to also take those arguemnts from stdin. At Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:14:40 +0200 Hans <[email protected]> wrote: > > Dear list, > > for my own purposes I need a bunch of packages from 32-bit bookworm. > > Is there an easy way, to download them, instead of download the whole > repository with rsync? > > I need normal *.deb and *.udeb files and my list is rather long, so that I > would automate this. I tried > > apt -d install < mylist.txt > > but this did not work. > > My list is a asci textfile and its entries are looking so: > > ---- snip ---- > > cdrom-detect > cebconf-udeb > di-utils > libglib2.0-udeb > .... > .... > and so on. > > You see, there is a mix of udeb and deb files. > > I would be happy, if these could be downloaded in one step, if possible. > On the other hand, if this is not possible at all, so please drop me a note. > > Thank you very much for your help. > > Best regards > > Hans > > > > -- Robert Heller -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364 Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Linux Administration Services [email protected] -- Webhosting Services
