Generating list of manually installed packages and querying individual packages

Question

I'd like to get a list of packages installed manually by apt or aptitude and be able to find out whether a foobar package was installed manually or automatically. Is there any neat way of doing that from the command line?

Answer 1

apt-mark showauto | grep -iE '^foobar$' will output "foobar" if the package was installed automatically, nothing otherwise.

aptitude search '!~M ~i' will list the packages that were not installed automatically. It's a pity aptitude won't be part of the default install on Ubuntu Desktop starting from 10.10.

Answer 2

The following script will print out all the packages that are not set to automatic install and hence were installed manually:

#!/usr/bin/python

try:
    import apt_pkg
except ImportError:
    print "Error importing apt_pkg, is python-apt installed?"
    sys.exit(1)

apt_pkg.init()
STATE_FILE = apt_pkg.Config.FindDir("Dir::State") + "extended_states"
auto = set()
tagfile = apt_pkg.ParseTagFile(open(STATE_FILE))
while tagfile.Step():
    pkgname = tagfile.Section.get("Package")
    autoInst = tagfile.Section.get("Auto-Installed")
    if not int(autoInst):
        auto.add(pkgname)
print "\n".join(sorted(auto))

it is based on how apt-mark prints out the automatically installed packages.

Answer 3

In newer versions of the package apt, there is also the apt-mark command

apt-mark showmanual

Answer 4

As Li Lo said, apt-mark showauto should get you a fat list of things automatically installed.

Now to show the things that are installed manually, it turns out there's a lovely simple search modifier for aptitude. But you don't want to to do that. You want to write a huge bash command that does some rocket science.

Note: This is more an illustration of how cool you'll look busting out massive bash commands to all your friends.

comm -3  <(dpkg-query --show -f '${Package} ${Status}\n' | \n
grep "install ok installed" | cut --delimiter=' ' -f 1) <(apt-mark showauto)

I broke it onto two lines for readability. What does this do?

• First we query dpkg for a list of packages that are installed.
• We filter those for the ones that are actually installed (not just residual config)
• We chop off the status
• We compare that list with the automated list from apt-mark
• We rock out because we can.

Answer 5

If no one gives you a nice answer using a apr-something command you can do it the hard way. Apt-get stores its info in /var/lib/apt/extended_states. Any file that is installed automatically will be added to this file. If you install a package already in this file manually, the package will remain in this file but with Auto-installed: 0 in the second line. It's not deleted.

Note: As expected better answers that are likely to work if file placement changes have appeared. I keep mine just in case the info on the file location is useful.

Answer 6

See this answer on unix.stackexchange.com for a solution that filters out stock packages.

Answer 7

I found a great answer to this on a related question. It uses the release manifest for the default package install list.

I also found this duplicate question.

I would love to see this as a filter in the Ubuntu Software Center. In Windows "Add/Remove Programs" serves this purpose.