The manual page and help for the apt-cache linux command. Apt-cache performs various operations on the APT package manager package cache. Apt-cache does not change the state of the system, but provides operations to search for packet metadata and generate useful data. Metadata is obtained and updated with the 'update' command, e.g. using apt-get so they can become obsolete if the last update was too long ago. In return, apt-cache works regardless of the availability of configured resources, such as without Internet access.