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Is there an easy way to schedule downloads through the 'Ubuntu Software Center'?

For example: mark a number of programs for download and installation between 2am and 8am?

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See /etc/cron.daily/apt for details. :) – sarnold May 14 '11 at 3:13
Thats a little different to what I need. I want to mark particular programs for download & instillation as opposed to performing a scheduled update. – Andrew May 14 '11 at 3:36
Ah. Try adding your own shell script in /etc/cron.daily/ that runs apt-get install packagename. I think it won't do anything if the package is up to date, and will install it without hassle if it isn't. Not sure about the dpkg-reconfigure stuff. You can have the /etc/cron.daily/apt file download the latest package lists for you. – sarnold May 14 '11 at 3:40
k, i'll play around with it. Its unfortunate the functionality isn't built into 'Ubuntu Software Center'. Is there any easy way to customise the 'Ubuntu Software Center'to allow this? (sounds like the answer is no). – Andrew May 14 '11 at 4:01
@user81182, I understand where you're coming from, but the Unix philosophy is to have a general purpose scheduling tool (crond) that can schedule anything to do anything with extremely flexible time specifications. :) The difficulty with your case is that you only want a subset of packages to be updated -- the configuration is very well prepared to upgrade everything or nothing, but middle grounds require a slightly further step. :) – sarnold May 15 '11 at 0:56
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migrated from stackoverflow.com May 14 '11 at 3:13

2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

You could try using an at command to run a scheduled apt-get install package.

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

The 'Ubuntu Software Center' doesn't specifically allow scheduling of software downloads/installation. However, the general purpose task scheduler crontab can be used to download/install programs. For example: to download/install eclipse at 2:30am:

  1. Go to the terminal and open crontab for editing:

    sudo crontab -e

  2. Add the following line:

    * 30 2 * * * apt-get install eclipse > /dev/null
  3. Save and close crontab (Ctrl + W for write)

Crontab will run at 2:30am and download/install eclipse. Any terminal outputs from this activity will be sent to /dev/null (trashed).

Tip: this site allows you to automatically build crontab entries:

http://www.htmlbasix.com/crontab.shtml

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