How do I list installed software with the installed size?

Question

I would like to have a list the installed software on my machine, with the disk space consumed by them alongside. I would prefer to be able to order by largest/smallest, but that is not a necessity.

I am the sort of person who will install software to try it, and never clean up after myself.

As a result, my 7GB (Windows and my Data are on separate partitions, as well as a swap area) Ubuntu 11.04 partition is suffering, and has started regularly showing warning messages.

I have cleaned my browser cache, as well as everything under Package Cleaner in Ubuntu Tweak, and am left with 149.81 MB off free space.

Answer 1

You can do this graphically in Synaptic .

• First ensure that you enabled the Installed Size and Download size columns (or only one if you want that one).

  • To do this, go to "Settings>Preferences" and choose "Columns and Fonts", then tick the columns you want to see.
  • Then click "OK".

• Once they are enabled, you can list the packages you have installed by download/installed size by click on the column.

• Please note: I do not have my packages listed in that way this screen shot, but it works.

Answer 2

Preferred solution

I have found a shorter answer, not requiring aptitude:

dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-size}\t${Package}\n' | column -t

Old proposed solution

The show command of aptitude is able to show the installed size of a package.

I have this little script, that make use of aptitude (to install separately) to have a list of all installed packages with sizes:

#!/bin/bash

export LC_ALL=C

aptitude show $(dpkg-query -Wf '${Package}\n') |
  awk '$1 == "Package:"     { name = $2 }
       $1 == "Uncompressed" { printf("%10s %s\n", $3, name) }' |
  awk '$1 ~ /k/ { $1 *= 1 }; $1 ~ /M/ { $1 *= 1024 }
       { printf("%9d %s\n", $1, $2)}'

Size are expressed in kilobytes, and are approximate, as returned by aptitude show pkg.

The script can be improved using a single awk invocation (but I'm lazy :-)

Answer 3

dpkg-query -W -f='${Installed-Size;8}  ${Package}\n' | sort -n

shows you a package list sorted by size