If you want to download the deb files without installing them, use the following command. The downloaded file will be at /var/cache/apt/archives . Needless to say, this works only on Debian based distros – like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, etc
apt-get -d install PACKAGE-NAME
Cheers!
This is only a limited solution, requiring:
a) you to have the root access and
b) you not having the PACKAGE-NAME installed.
A workaround is to print the URIs and feed them to wget, as described here:
http://hukkinen.jp/blog/post/HUKKINEN/2012/06/downloading-deb-packages-with-apt-in-userspace/