Remove packages from untrusted source and reinstall them

Question

I have a Kali Linux installed recently, but due to its inflexible mirror selection, all deb packages are downloaded from a mirror that I don't trust. Is it possible to tell apt / dselect to re-download and reinstall all packages, assuming sources.list has been updated to use new mirror?

Answer 1

As Alex pointed out:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get install --reinstall $(dpkg --get-selections | grep -w 'install$' | cut -f 1)

The first one makes sure apt's cache is empty. That way apt-get will need to download the packages from the repositories. The second, first you need a list of all installed packages, which is what the $(...) part is doing, and then you are using apt-get to reinstall them. There's another way with aptitude:

sudo aptitude --reinstall install '~i'

The ~i search for "installed packages".

For both methods you will end without any automatically installed packages, so you must use apt-mark showauto > packages before doing this, and sudo apt-mark auto $(cat packages) to reestablish the list.

Answer 2

The answers here helped me solve the problem, this solution probably not the most efficient but gets the job done.

#!/bin/bash
for package in `dpkg --get-selections | grep -w 'install$' | cut -f 1`; do
    apt-get install --reinstall $package;
done

Answer 3

I used this script and was asked from time to time to give a Y(es) Than the script went on. But because it takes quite a while this makes the time to complete much longer. I changed the script with inserting --yes force-yes Recommend forcing automatic def/old config acceptance as well

#!/bin/bash 
for package in `dpkg --get-selections | grep -w 'install$' | cut -f 1`; do
    apt-get --yes --force-yes -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confold" install --reinstall $package
done