Show the List of Installed Packages on Ubuntu or Debian

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Show the List of Installed Packages on Ubuntu or Debian

March 9th, 2010 akhmad daniel sembiring Leave a comment Go to comments

The command we need to use to list the packages currently installed in Ubuntu or Debian is dpkg –get-selections. For example:

# dpkg --get-selections
acpi                                            install
acpi-support-base                               install
acpid                                           install
adduser                                         install
apache2                                         install
apache2-mpm-prefork                             install
apache2-utils                                   install
apache2.2-common                                install
apt                                             install
apt-utils                                       install
aptitude                                        install
autoconf                                        install
automake                                        install
automake1.4                                     install
autotools-dev                                   install
avahi-daemon                                    install
bacula-common                                   install
bacula-fd                                       install
base-files                                      install
base-passwd                                     install
bash                                            install
bind9-host                                      install
binutils                                        install

…

It will return a long list showing all the installed packages. To filter to specific list of packages, for example we only need to show java packages, combine it with grep, for example:

# dpkg --get-selections|grep java
java-common                                     install
java-gcj-compat                                 install
java-gcj-compat-headless                        install
libbcel-java                                    install
liblog4j1.2-java                                install
liblog4j1.2-java-gcj                            install
libmx4j-java                                    install
libpg-java                                      install
libregexp-java                                  install
sun-java6-bin                                   install
sun-java6-jdk                                   install
sun-java6-jre                                   install

We can find the locations of the files within a package from the list by using the dpkg -L command, such as:

# dpkg -L sun-java6-jdk|more
/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/sun-java6-jdk
/usr/share/doc/sun-java6-jdk/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/sun-java6-jdk/copyright
/usr/share/doc/sun-java6-jdk/README.alternatives
/usr/share/doc/sun-java6-jdk/README.html
/usr/share/menu
/usr/share/menu/sun-java6-jdk
/usr/share/applications
/usr/share/applications/sun-java6-jconsole.desktop
/usr/share/lintian
/usr/share/lintian/overrides
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/sun-java6-jdk
/usr/share/doc-base
/usr/share/doc-base/sun-java6-jdk-readme
/usr/lib
/usr/lib/jvm
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/include
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/include/linux
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/include/linux/jni_md.h
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/include/linux/jawt_md.h
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/include/jni.h
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/include/jdwpTransport.h

…