How to list/download the recursive dependencies of a debian package?

Question

I need to list/download all the recursive dependencies of a debian package.

Suppose i need to install package a.deb and it depends on package b.deb and again package b.d

Answer 1

You can use apt-rdepends for getting all the dependencies for a package recursively. And by piping the result to grep you can have only the package names and omit unneeded information.

Example:

 $ apt-rdepends cowsay | grep -E '^[a-zA-Z0-9]'

Output:

cowsay
perl
libbz2-1.0
libc6
libgcc1
gcc-4.9-base
multiarch-support
libdb5.3
libgdbm3
dpkg
liblzma5
libselinux1
libpcre3
tar
libacl1
libattr1
zlib1g
install-info
perl-base
perl-modules

You can then download those packages using apt-get download $package and install them offline on your machine.

By default, apt installs Recommends, so you might want to run apt-rdepends like so:

apt-rdepends -f Depends,PreDepends,Recommends -s Depends,PreDepends,Recommends cowsay

Since apt-rdepends by default follows and shows only Depends, PreDepends.