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I run RaspBMC - a distro based on Raspbian, that's a custom minimal Debian for the Raspberry Pi.

If I recall correctly, the man utility is NOT installed by default with RaspBMC (although I may be mistaken).

The problem is, packages installed prior to installing the actual man utility do not install their man pages. This includes the packages that come pre-installed with the system.

Example: I tried with udisks-glue (which comes pre-installed)

$ man udisks-glue No manual entry for udisks-glue

After re-installing that package, the man page is there.

$ apt-get remove udisks-glue $ apt-get install udisks-glue $ man udisks-glue [Man page gets displayed]

The question is: can I somehow install all the missing man pages easily?

From what I can see, installing the man pages is a step that's run for each apt-get install command: 

Unpacking udisks-glue (from .../udisks-glue_1.3.4-1_armhf.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... [...]

Using divide-and-conquer, I assume this could be obtained by:

  1. getting a list of all installed packages ( dpkg -l | grep ??? | cut ??? | ??? )
  2. finding a way to tell apt-get to re-install a package without messing with the config (a remove + install kinda fits the bill, but I don't think it plays nice with dependencies)
    EDIT: this should do it:
    sudo apt-get install --reinstall packagename
  3. run 2. over each item in 1.

Is this the (simplest) way to go?

Update

I remembered I bricked RaspBMC once doing apt-get upgrade, so I want to make sure the packages are NOT upgraded to newer versions when reinstalling (which seems to be the case with apt-get install --reinstall by default.

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2 Answers 2

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Starting from @derobert's answer, I worked my way to getting exactly the current version of all packages to reinstall.

Short version:

sudo dpkg -l | grep '^ii ' | sed 's/ */\t/g' |cut -f 2,3 | sed 's/\t/=/' | xargs apt-get install --reinstall -y --ignore-missing

Explained:

The key is actually specifying the required version of each package.

The general command is: 

apt-get install --reinstall <package>=<version>

Breaking down the long command line: 

$ dpkg -l Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad) ||/ Name Version Architecture Description +++-===========================================================-==================================-============-======================================================================== ii adduser 3.113+nmu3 all add and remove users and groups ii apt 0.9.7.8+rpi1 armhf commandline package manager ii apt-utils 0.9.7.8+rpi1 armhf package managment related utility programs ii aptitude-common 0.6.8.2-1 all architecture indepedent files for the aptitude package manager ii atmel-firmware 1.3-4 all Firmware for Atmel at76c50x wireless networking chips. $ dpkg -l | grep '^ii '

...gets rid of the header lines and a few packages with status 'hold' (marked as hi instead of ii)

$ dpkg -l | grep '^ii ' | sed 's/ */\t/g'

... converts any number of spaces to a single TAB character, preparing the ground for cut.
(Btw: why, oh why, doesn't sed support x+ regex for "character x, one or more times"? It can be emulated with xx* - meaning 'x' once followed by 'x' zero or more times)

The output looks like this:

ii adduser 3.113+nmu3 all add and remove users and groups ii apt 0.9.7.8+rpi1 armhf commandline package manager ii apt-utils 0.9.7.8+rpi1 armhf package managment related utility programs ii aptitude-common 0.6.8.2-1 all architecture indepedent files for the aptitude package manager ii atmel-firmware 1.3-4 all Firmware for Atmel at76c50x wireless networking chips.

Next: 

$ dpkg -l | grep '^ii ' | sed 's/ */\t/g' | cut -f 2,3 | sed 's/\t/=/'

...gets the name and version of each package (the 2nd and 3rd fields), and replaces the tab that separates them with an '='

adduser=3.113+nmu3 apt=0.9.7.8+rpi1 apt-utils=0.9.7.8+rpi1 aptitude-common=0.6.8.2-1 atmel-firmware=1.3-4

Finally, pipe each of the above to apt-get as a long list of arguments using xargs.

Notice the parameter --ignore-missing - this command is run as 'best effort' - I don't want the updating to stop because some packages are not available to reinstall (those will stay unmodified)

$ dpkg -l | grep '^ii ' | sed 's/ */\t/g' |cut -f 2,3 | sed 's/\t/=/' | xargs apt-get install --reinstall --ignore-missing

While testing, I also added a --dry-run argument to apt-get.

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Sounds like a reasonably simple way to go. The command to get the list of packages and their status is dpkg --get-selections, so you could do something like this:

dpkg --get-selections | grep '\<install$' | cut -f1 | xargs apt-get install --reinstall
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