Upgrade individual packages for Debian-based systems

If you are using Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc), you are probably familiar with the apt-get update followed by the apt-get upgrade routine. That is what I regularly use to upgrade ALL packages that have an update available.

But what if you only want to upgrade certain individual packages?

apt-get upgrade will upgrade ALL or nothing. So, that is out of the question.

What you need is apt-get install. apt-get install serves dual purposes: install and upgrade. It installs a package if it is not already installed. If it is already installed, apt-get install will upgrade the package to the latest version.

You should still run apt-get update before apt-get install. You can specify one or more package names as arguments to the apt-get install command.

For example, to upgrade these 2 packages: libfreetype6, libtiff4:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libfreetype6 libtiff4