Debian: Installed package list

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Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,linux.debian.user

>How can I get a list of what packages are installed on my Debian?

dpkg -l

or:

dpkg --get-selections

(The former has more detail, the latter is machine-parseable.)

>Is there any way to use this list for my future installation?

dpkg --get-selections > selections
[move to another computer]
dpkg --set-selections < selections
dselect install (or apt-get dselect-upgrade, same difference)

BTW, linux.debian.user is a newsgroup gatewayed from the debian-user mailing list (see http://lists.debian.org/). I'm not convinced that messages posted to the newsgroup make it to the mailing list; I've retained the crosspost just to see, but at any rate it probably won't behave the same way everywhere. If you want to ask debian-user something, best use the mailing list instead.

Colin Watson

Debian: Installed package list

> >  dpkg --get-selections
> >
> >(The former has more detail, the latter is machine-parseable.)
>
>err, just what are you trying to do with the output of dpkg -l that you
>can't do automatically?

Feed it to dpkg —set-selections (well, possible, but fiddly);
Not have reasonably-sized package names truncated (you can "fix" this by setting COLUMNS, but it's ugly).

Maybe I should have said "conveniently machine-parseable". Anyway, the output of 'dpkg -l' isn't really meant to be processed: if you want the installed version and short description for some reason, you're probably better off looking in /var/lib/dpkg/status yourself, which will be faster in any case.

Colin Watson