Get Package Dependencies on Ubuntu

Most of the time, packages requires additional dependencies to work as intended. This tutorial demonstrates how to get package dependencies on Ubuntu.

Use apt-cache or apt command with depends argument to get a list of package dependencies:

apt-cache depends build-essential

apt depends build-essential

Output example:

build-essential
 |Depends: libc6-dev
  Depends: <libc-dev>
    libc6-dev
  Depends: gcc (>= 4:10.2)
  Depends: g++ (>= 4:10.2)
  Depends: make
    make-guile
  Depends: dpkg-dev (>= 1.17.11)