Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch +for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free +space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'. I normally +would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install <somepackages>' to +upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of +packages to download fall below the amount of free space available. +Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got +tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually. I concluded +that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and +decided to see if I could automate it. I came up with this small +script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':
+ +
+#!/bin/sh
+#
+# Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
+# upgradable package in one lump. Fetching packages to upgrade using
+# apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
+# flag for manual/automatic.
+
+set -e
+
+ignore() {
+ if [ "$1" ]; then
+ grep -v "$1"
+ else
+ cat
+ fi
+}
+
+for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
+ echo "Upgrading $p"
+ apt clean
+ apt install --download-only -y $p
+ for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
+ if [ -e "$f" ]; then
+ dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
+ break
+ fi
+ done
+done
+The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to +download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the +downloaded packages using dpkg. The idea is to upgrade packages +without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of +the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency). To +use it, simply run it as root from the command line. If it fail, try +'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again. This +might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old +packages. dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.
+ +It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to +upgrade. The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip +the packages that are simply too large to unpack. Today this was +'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar +problems earlier (like TeX).
+ +As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my +activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address +15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
+![[photo of subway info screen]](http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-03-02-ruter-debian-lenny.jpeg)
