How to manually insert a repository in source.list?

Question

I tried to add a new APT repository using this command:

add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao

but I got a "command not found" error. I tried installing python-software-properties, but it's already installed:

root@debian:~# apt-get install python-software-properties
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
python-software-properties is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

So I decided to add the repository manually to source.list, but don't know how. How can I edit source.list directly?

Answer 1

If you visit the PPA's page it'll show you what lines to manually insert into the source.list

Click on Technical Details which reveals the following

Choose your Ubuntu version and copy/paste the lines into the bottom of your source.list file.

Answer 2

One year after your post, I had the same issue on Ubuntu 12.10 I figured out how to bypass the problem (not really to fix it) so I take the time to post a reply just for the record. We never know, if anybody face this problem after me.

The FIX (kind of)

apt-get install software-properties-common

The explaination (kind of)

It seems there is a dependancy issue on this package(s) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-properties/+bug/1024408

Proof (kind of)

You can see the python-software-properties doesn't include the add-apt-repository binary :

dpkg -L software-properties-common

While the software-properties-common does :

dpkg -L software-properties-common