make apt-get to wait if another apt-get is running?

Question

I have seen many softwares such as Update Manager and Synaptic Package Manager, they wait if some other program is using the apt-get and is locked. How can we do this through the Terminal? I saw apt-get's manual but didn't find anything useful.

Answer 1

You can use the aptdcon command to queue up package manager tasks by communicating with aptdaemon instead of using apt-get directly.

So basically you can just do sudo aptdcon install chromium-browser or whatever and while that command is running you can run it again but install different packages and apt-daemon will just queue them up instead of erroring out.

This is especially useful if you're doing a long upgrade or something and want to keep installing packages or if you're scripting something together and want to make sure installing things will be more reliable.

Answer 2

Only one package manager can access the package directory while using apt-get. Either you have to quit an existing one to start a new one or you have to wait for one to finish to start a new one.

The commands corresponding to synaptic search and install are respectively "apt-cache search package" and "sudo apt-get install package".

Answer 3

As far as I know, you can select multiple packages from synaptic and also you can provide multiple packages to apt-get. So all you need to do, is to provide apt-get with all the packages you want to install, that should do the trick.