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On many distributions and the BSDs there are ways to determine the number of packages in the distro's enabled repositories, e.g. on FreeBSD you could use pkg stats, is there such a way with Ubuntu? I know how to count the number of installed packages, namely using:

dpkg -l | wc -l

which on my Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver (developmental version) system returns 1962 (and yes I know not to rely on the stability of a developmental release, as things can and often do break, this is just a system for me to satisfy my curiosity about the new release to come), but how do I count all packages in its enabled repositories?

I would imagine that apt-cache search "*" would return a list of all available packages, which I could then count with wc -l but no it returns:

E: Regex compilation error

.

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2 Answers 2

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apt-cache has a function to list all packages

apt-cache pkgnames | wc -l

returns 58218 packages with main, universe, multiverse, restricted and backports enabled on artful.

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  • Oh rofl, I thought there was a search element to it. Sorry, nvm. It works.
    – Josh Pinto
    Commented Feb 16, 2018 at 12:42
  • sudo is not required for apt-cache
    – MestreLion
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 7:45
  • @MestreLion thanks. Corrected.
    – Robert Riedl
    Commented Jun 6, 2023 at 16:51
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You can use:

$ apt-cache stats
Total package names: 73411 (1.468 k)
[...]

to get that and way more information about the repositories enabled that you probably care about.

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