One of the biggest advantages of rug is user management. Normally only root can update or install new packages. With rug, you can distribute the right to update the system to other users and restrict them, for example, only to the update right without the possibility to remove software. Privileges you can grant are:

To give a user permission to update the system, use the command rug ua  username upgrade. Replace username with the name of the user. To revoke the privileges of a user, use command rug ud username. To list users with their rights, use rug ul.

To change the current privileges of a user, use rug ue username. Replace username with name of the desired user. The edit command is interactive. It lists privileges of the selected user and the offers you a prompt. Enter the plus (+) or minus (-) symbol and the name of the privilege then press Enter. For example, to permit the user to delete software, enter +remove. To save and quit, press Enter on a blank line.

Using rug, the system can be updated automatically, for example, with scripts. The simplest example is the fully automatic update. To do this, as root configure a cron job that executes rug up -y. The up -y option downloads and installs the patches from your catalogs without confirmation.

However, you may not want the patches installed automatically. Instead, you may want to retrieve the patches and select the patches for installation at a later time. To download patches only, use the command rug up -dy. The up -dy option downloads the patches from your catalogs without confirmation and saves them to the rug cache. The default location of the rug cache is /var/cache/redcarpet.

rug comes with many preferences to provide the update functionality in different network configurations. To list the preferences that may be set, use rug get. To set a preference variable, enter rug set. For example, adjust settings if you need to update your system, but the computer is behind a proxy server. Before downloading updates, send your username and password to the proxy server. To do so, use the commands:

rug set proxy-url url_path
rug set proxy-username name
rug set proxy-password password

Replace url_path with the name of your proxy server. Replace name with your username. Replace password with your password.

For more information about updating from the command line, enter rug --help or see the rug(1) man page. The --help option is also available for all rug commands. If, for example, you want to read help for rug update, enter rug update --help.