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How can I do this without reinstalling the rest of the files as well?

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2 Answers 2

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30

Download the package, for example transmission-daemon, with

sudo apt-get --download-only install transmission-daemon

unpack the package with

mkdir ~/dummy
dpkg-deb -x /var/cache/apt/archives/transmission-daemon_*.deb ~/dummy

restore the file, for example /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon

sudo cp ~/dummy/etc/init.d/transmission-daemon /etc/init.d

remove the dir

rm -rf ~/dummy
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5
  • 2
    It should also be noted that apt-get download downloads to the current working directory .
    – user369927
    Jan 18, 2015 at 16:14
  • 5
    You can avoid extracting the entire archive using a pipeline involving dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile and tar, like so: dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile "$package"*.deb | tar -x ./path/to/file
    – kojiro
    May 8, 2017 at 13:20
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    /tmp/dummy seems more convenient that ~/dummy and the need to remove it.
    – Kalle Richter
    Jul 1, 2017 at 19:42
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    Prefer apt-get download since apt-get --download-only install will stop if the package is already installed. As indicated by camypaj's answer.
    – Julien Carsique
    Jan 31, 2019 at 11:11
  • To expand on kojiro's comment, I had to look at what's the default value of nginx's worker_processes setting on a range of machines. So I came up with the following command: for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/nginx-common*; do dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile "$f" | tar xO ./etc/nginx/nginx.conf | grep worker_processes; done.
    – x-yuri
    Mar 30, 2019 at 15:21
16

I know this is a bit old, but here's my improvement:

$ sudo apt-get download <package-name>

instead of

$ sudo apt-get --download-only install <package-name>

I had a situation where the package was already installed (hence, the proposed solution didn't work), and I wanted to restore just one config file, in order to fix the problem.

Cheers

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  • 3
    if you have a package already installed then it's typically found in /var/cache/apt/archives/ and you shouldn't have to download it.
    – Ahmed Masud
    Jan 21, 2014 at 17:00
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    Yes, but only if the package was installed relatively recently, and the archives have not been manually or automatically cleaned.
    – joeytwiddle
    Jan 29, 2016 at 4:33
  • The alternative would be to add --reinstall to the --download-only mode. Then the package will be downloaded even if it had been already installed.
    – Ruslan
    May 18, 2020 at 16:59

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