How to install a ‘deb’ file on Debian Linux (dpkg, apt)

As a quick note, this stackexchange.com page has some good background information on how to install a deb package file from the command line on Debian Linux (which in my case is Ubuntu 16.04). The short answer is that if you have a deb file named google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb, you’ll want to run these two commands, one after the other, as shown:

$ sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

$ sudo apt-get install -f

The complete example

To give you some more perspective on how this works, here are those two commands shown with all of the output that they produce. Note that I put my deb file in a temporary directory before running the commands:

/home/alvin/Desktop/tmp> sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
[sudo] password for alvin:
Selecting previously unselected package google-chrome-stable.
(Reading database ... 258250 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking google-chrome-stable (56.0.2924.87-1) ...
Setting up google-chrome-stable (56.0.2924.87-1) ...
update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable to provide /usr/bin/x-www-browser (x-www-browser) in auto mode
update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable to provide /usr/bin/gnome-www-browser (gnome-www-browser) in auto mode
update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable to provide /usr/bin/google-chrome (google-chrome) in auto mode
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) ...
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-6ubuntu3.1) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1ubuntu5) ...
Processing triggers for bamfdaemon (0.5.3~bzr0+16.04.20160701-0ubuntu1) ...
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf-2.index...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.59ubuntu1) ...

/home/alvin/Desktop/tmp> sudo apt-get install -f
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  linux-headers-4.4.0-31 linux-headers-4.4.0-31-generic linux-image-4.4.0-31-generic
  linux-image-extra-4.4.0-31-generic
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

After I ran those commands to install the deb file I removed the tmp directory I used during the installation process.

For more information see that stackexchange page. This debian.org page also has a good list of apt and dpkg commands, and this debian.org page shows how to list installed packages.