Pk4 resolves the specified argument(s) as either:

1. the name of a Debian binary package, and selects its Debian source package. 2. the name of a Debian source package, and selects it. 3. or a file path, and selects the Debian source package of the owning package.

The source package version is either the installed version (if any) or the installation candidate, as per “apt-cache policy”.

Then, pk4 downloads the entire selected source package (every file referenced by — and including — its .dsc file) and prints the output directory path.

pk4… • caps the disk usage of the checked out packages by deleting the oldest ones after crossing a limit (default: 2GiB). • allows users to enable supplied or shipped-with-pk4 hooks, e.g. git-init. • optimizes for low latency of each operation. • respects your APT configuration, i.e. should work in company intranets. • comes with tab completion for bash and zsh. • tries hard to download source packages, with fallback to snapshot.debian.org.