What if I try to install something I have already, like curl?

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I know this a dumb question, still I am curious.

I am wondering, what if I try to installing something I already have? Something like curl. For example, the the first step of instruction given by the Brave website on how to install on Mint was to install curl.

So I am wondering, what would happen? Duplicated program? Nothing happened? Updating the program?

Secondary, could I safely skip that command if I already have say curl?

Thank you for considering this dumb question of mine

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There are several ways to install programs in Linux, and how it behaves is a function of which method you use. In Mint and other Debian-based distros, the usual way is to use apt (whether from the command line or using a graphical utility like Synaptic).

I went to the page in question, and the first command listed is the usual type, ‘sudo apt install curl’. If you enter that command and you already have curl installed, this is similar to what you see:

$ sudo apt install curl
[sudo] password for username:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Reading state information… Done
curl is already the newest version (7.81.0-1ubuntu1.15).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

As you can see, it checked to see if I had curl installed, and when it saw that I did, it stopped, as there was nothing to do. Since curl was installed via the usual apt package manager, it would already be kept up to date under normal circumstances.

You can safely skip that line if you already have curl installed, yes. It would just give you a message similar to the one I cited above anyway.

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Thank you very much for your reply!   That was helpful to me.

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