apt-cache unmet { unmet dependencies }

[andy baxter]

thomas fisher wrote:
> In reading the manual on apt-cache and checking it out I ran 
> " apt-cache umet ". I was totally unprepared for the long list of unmets.
> Some appear to be not very critical { obscure fonts }. Is there a quick method 
> of filtering this long list so that only the more critical dependencies can 
> be dealt with?
> Tom
>
> apt-cache     - APT package handling utility -- cache manipulator
>       DESCRIPTION
>        apt-cache performs a variety of operations on APT’s package cache.
>        apt-cache does not manipulate the state of the system but does provide
>        operations to search and generate interesting output from the package
>        metadata.
>              
>              unmet
>            unmet displays a summary of all unmet dependencies in the package
>            cache.
>
>   
If you still want to do this, I got the following shell script to work 
(I wanted to practice my scripting...):
apt-cache unmet | (p="" ;while read n l ; do if [ "$n" == "Package" ] ; 
then p="$n $l" ; else if [ "$n" != "Suggests:" ] && [ "$n" != 
"Recommends:" ] ; then echo $p; echo $n $l ; fi ;fi;done) |less

It filters out the 'suggests' and 'recommends' dependencies. But as 
gerard pointed out, it might not tell you what you thought it did.