Software Updater or manual update?

Since there are many Xenial bugs reported in Launchpad I’m planning on using apt to keep my system current at least until 16.04.1 is released. Instead of manually typing the commands required I made a small script named sapt [for sudo apt]

  1. Contents

    #!/bin/bash
    sudo apt update
    sudo apt upgrade
    sudo apt autoremove

  2. after saving to your directory change permissions
    chmod 755 sapt

  3. test it
    ./sapt

  4. if it runs correctly move it ~/bin
    a) if directory ~/bin doesn’t exist make it
    mkdir bin
    b) then move it
    mv sapt bin

Next time you want to update your system open a terminal and type sapt [assuming you used the names in this example]

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If you’ve decided to use a manual method for updating please be aware that the command line method has a shortcoming:

When a reboot is required to “finish or install” the upgrade there is no prompt forthcoming.

The upside to this:

Software Updater does prompt you even if you updated manually!

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If you append “-y” apt will execute the upgrade and autoremove without asking.

sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove -y

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I haven’t looked recently but it’s probably the same. Two nice files can be detected and one even tells you what package(s) caused it:

/var/run/reboot-required
/var/run/reboot-required.pkgs

Maybe a nice addition to sapt? I’m a synaptic user - love the history but it has the same problem.

EDIT: Just tried this in a UM 16.04 VM that I knew had a kernel update. I added these 2 lines to sapt:

cat /var/run/reboot-required 2>/dev/null
cat /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs 2>/dev/null

This spits out the contents of these 2 files. Errors are redirected to /dev/null so they say nothing if those files do not exist.

Here’s the last output I just got from a real update using sapt:

. . .
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.elf
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
done
*** System restart required ***
libssl1.0.0
linux-image-4.4.0-22-generic
linux-base
linux-base
linux-base
bill@um1604:~$

Interesting… the important ssl update required a reboot, too. :grin:

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