Sure it is¹ (kinda):

  --no-upgrade
      Do not upgrade packages; when used in conjunction with install, no-upgrade will prevent packages on the command line from being upgraded if they are already installed. Configuration Item: APT::Get::Upgrade.

The canonical way to do the thing you want via apt-get is `apt-get install`. And if you read the man page from start to finish, it'd be clear to you... but it is tucked away there in the most obtuse, indirect, ungreppable way. :'D

That would be a great addendum to an EXAMPLES section! In the meantime, this is documented well and clearly in the tldr page for apt-get².

Fwiw, apt-get not only sucks, but has been known to suck for many, many years (more than a decade at least). Its interface sticks around because it's basically plumbing at this point. But you, as a user, should never use it (or `apt-cache` or `apt-*`, if you can avoid it.

Aptitude is preferable for a whole host of reasons, not least of which being that its upgrade commands have the semantics you'd intuitively expect³. They take packages as an optional list of positional args, and upgrade everything only if you don't pass any. (Aptitude also has a ton of other nice features and I highly recommend it.)

There's also an official new porcelain in APT itself, aptly called "apt". It preserves⁴ the semantics of apt-get's `upgrade` command, but its usage message actually matches that syntactically— hopefully it'll barf if you tell it `apt upgrade windsurf` or whatever.

But automation needs to rely on the ugly, old, disparate APT commands that have been around forever and can't really change. That probably goes, too, for things guides want you to copy and paste, or instructions handed over to LLMs.

(This is one reason that if you only learn to use APT from guides/tutorials whose primary concern is something other than documenting or teaching how to use Debian-based systems, you'll probably never learn to use the correct tools (the nicer, newer ones).)

1: https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/apt/apt-get.8.en.html

2: https://tldr.inbrowser.app/pages/linux/apt-get

3: https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/aptitude/aptitude.8.en.ht...

4: https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/apt/apt.8.en.html

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