I got tired of re-installing all my software after a fresh install, so here's what I did...
mkdir /home/jj/Documents/Repository
and a loop to get them there...
for i in `ls -1 /var/cache/apt/archives` ; do sudo cp /var/cache/apt/archives/$i /home/jj/Documents/Repository ; done
They are owned by root, so I 'chown jj:jj *' so I could copy them to my backup medium. ( I have /home as sda3, so manual partition setup during (re)-install saves my /home partition).
To re-install all of them in 1 kickstart:
sudo dpkg -i /home/jj/Documents/Repository/*.deb
And here's a bash script because we HATE typing repetitive stuff.
#!/bin/bash
for i in `ls -1 /var/cache/apt/archives/` ; do sudo cp /var/cache/apt/archives/$i /home/jj/Documents/Repository ; done
You can ignore this error "cp: omitting directory `/var/cache/apt/archives/partial'"
Mine is empty.
Here's a cleanup script by karthick87