As you can see the last line says “Reading package lists… Done” which means that my computer went ahead and read all the available software in the repos and compared them with the version present on my end and found that they are up-to-date!Ĭontinuing with our factory analogy, assume our manager is maintaining an excel sheet containing the list of parts available from various equipment manufacturers. All of these web addresses are repos that contain software. Your output might look a bit different than mine, but the important things to note here are the “Hits”. The screenshot below shows how the output of our command looks like. The apt-get command is responsible for installation, removal, and updating of software in our system.Ī good analogy is to think of your computer as a factory and the apt-get command as the manager in that factory who is responsible for the installation of new equipment, removal of equipment that is no longer needed, and update desired equipment to their latest versions, while maintaining records of the equipment names and versions which are currently present in the factory.

Let us start by exploring the answer to the question “What does apt-get do?” I can see that the above paragraph has too many “technical terms” (which I promised not to use!) but that is just the short version of the answer to explain the command “ sudo apt-get update“, so do not worry if you don’t understand every word in that paragraph!īy the end of this article we will get back to this short answer version and by that time I am sure you will be able to understand what every word meant in the short answer above! What is the meaning of the command “ sudo apt-get update“? sudo apt-get update is the command used to updates the package index files to get the latest list of available packages in the repositories.

Let us see what this command does, how it does that, and the reason you need to do this every time you need to install an app on your Linux computer.įor those of you in a hurry, here is the short version of the answer! The Short Version of the Answer

In this article, I have tried to explain what this command means from a beginner’s perspective avoiding unnecessary “technical terms” and I have tried to keep this article concise so that you can get through the entire article in about 10 to 20 mins max! I guess to beginners, it just feels like a magic spell to get something installed! I was just happy that I was able to type something in the Terminal and that it actually worked and did what I wanted it to do! I did not pay much attention to what I actually typed in.

Aptget update