
update

This operation expects no arguments. It's probably one of the most frequent
operations you will be running. Essentially, this operation updates the remote
tree information by downloading the FILELIST.TXT file from the mirror, which
contains, among other information, the full list of available packages. This
list is in turn used to determine if there are new packages, if some of your
packages are outdated or if some packages have become unavailable.

Apart from this, the operation also downloads any new entrires found in the
Slackware change log, that you can, and should, later review using the
"changelog" operation, as this will give you information about changes and
sometimes helpful hints in performing an upgrade. Normally, running the
"changelog" operation is followed by running the "list-transient" operation to
get a list of packages that have been moved to a transient state. From there
you would perform a variety of operations in order to get them back to
non-transient states.

As this is a frequently-run operation, "update" also takes the opportunity to
show you the size of the package cache, should you decide it's a good moment to
run the "clean-cache" operation to get rid of old and no longer relevant
package archive files previously downloaded to the package cache.

Also see: changelog, list-transient, clean-cache.

