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33.1 Installing and Removing Packages

Assuming a package is available in the file image-1.0.0.tar.gz it can be installed from the Octave prompt with the command

pkg install image-1.0.0.tar.gz

If the package is installed successfully nothing will be printed on the prompt, but if an error occurred during installation it will be reported. It is possible to install several packages at once by writing several package files after the pkg install command. If a different version of the package is already installed it will be removed prior to installing the new package. This makes it easy to upgrade and downgrade the version of a package, but makes it impossible to have several versions of the same package installed at once.

To see which packages are installed type

pkg list
-| Package Name  | Version | Installation directory
-| --------------+---------+-----------------------
-|        image *|   1.0.0 | /home/jwe/octave/image-1.0.0

In this case only version 1.0.0 of the image package is installed. The '*' character next to the package name shows that the image package is loaded and ready for use.

It is possible to remove a package from the system using the pkg uninstall command like this

pkg uninstall image

If the package is removed successfully nothing will be printed in the prompt, but if an error occurred it will be reported. It should be noted that the package file used for installation is not needed for removal, and that only the package name as reported by pkg list should be used when removing a package. It is possible to remove several packages at once by writing several package names after the pkg uninstall command.

To minimize the amount of code duplication between packages it is possible that one package depends on another one. If a package depends on another, it will check if that package is installed during installation. If it is not, an error will be reported and the package will not be installed. This behaviour can be disabled by passing the -nodeps flag to the pkg install command

pkg install -nodeps my_package_with_dependencies.tar.gz

Since the installed package expects its dependencies to be installed it may not function correctly. Because of this it is not recommended to disable dependency checking.