Is there a place where I can look what updates I've installed?
You can read the history.log
file in /var/log/apt
.
Eg. less /var/log/apt/history.log
.
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6Worth noting that there may be older history files in that folder, not just
/var/log/apt/history.log
. Maybe something like/var/log/apt/history.log.1.gz
– Max Bileschi Nov 22 '19 at 16:17 -
1Still working even on Bionic. Just in case someone's afraid because of the response's age. – Alfabravo May 20 '20 at 15:24
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4
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9
/var/log/apt contains a history of package installations. However, by default, it is managed by logrotate
which compresses and ages out old entries.
On 10.04 Click (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager > File > History)
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12All I get is a list of packages that I installed via Synaptic, it doesn't show all the packages I updated via Update Manager. – Isaiah Nov 21 '10 at 19:39
As an alternative to lgarzo's answer, you can grep
what you are interested in from /var/log/dpkg.log
. E.g., if you want to see everything you installed or upgraded yesterday, you could run:
cat /var/log/dpkg.log | grep "^2012-03-25.*\ installed\ "
One thing to note: this will also list manually installed packages (sudo dpkg -i ...
), which won't show up in apt's history.
Even better use zgrep if it's installed so you can find lines in gzipped files as well
zgrep "^2012-03-25.*\ installed\ " /var/log/dpkg.log*
It's now possible to do this through the software center as well! Go to History and you can display all of your updates and installations.
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Sure is. I don't think this was available in previous distributions... – Nick Pascucci Nov 21 '10 at 19:53
It became useful for us to have a slightly more easy and accurate answer to the question "when was the last time we patched this thing?". So I put this together. I tested it on 12.04 and 14.04 and 16.04. It returns reasonably accurate answers for that question. Note: "reasonably accurate" probably isn't "completely accurate". Note: "for that question" only.
sample output:
xenial% 9: ./linuxpatchdate
2016-07-19 54
2017-02-24 363
2017-03-08 7
2017-03-09 2
subroutines and program:
#!/usr/bin/perl
#------------------ subroutines --------------------
sub parseRecord {
my $sdate = "";
my $useful = 0;
my $packages = 0;
my @ptmp;
while (my $recordLine = shift() ) {
if ($recordLine =~ m/^Start-Date: ([\d\-]*).*/) {
$sdate = $1;
}
elsif ($recordLine =~ m/^Commandline:.*upgrade/) {
$useful = 1;
}
elsif ($recordLine =~ m/^Install: (.*)/) {
$recordLine =~ s/\([^\)]*\)//g;
@ptmp = split(/,/,$recordLine);
$packages = $packages + $#ptmp + 1;
}
elsif ($recordLine =~ m/^Upgrade: (.*)/) {
$recordLine =~ s/\([^\)]*\)//g;
@ptmp = split(/,/,$recordLine);
$packages = $packages + $#ptmp + 1;
}
}
if ($useful) {
return ($sdate,$packages);
}
else {
return ("0",0);
}
}
#------------------ main program --------------------
@lines = split(/\n/,`/bin/zcat -f /var/log/apt/history.log /var/log/apt/history*gz`);
my %patchHash;
my $line;
my @inputLines;
my $pushDate = "";
my $pushNum = "";
foreach $line (@lines) {
# all records separated by blank lines
if ($line !~ /./) {
# no-op
}
elsif ($line =~ m/^Start-Date: ([\d\-]*).*/) {
@inputLines = ();
push (@inputLines, $line);
}
elsif ($line =~ m/^End-Date: ([\d\-]*).*/) {
($pushDate, $pushNum) = parseRecord(@inputLines);
if ($pushNum != 0) {
$patchHash{$pushDate} += $pushNum;
}
}
else {
push (@inputLines, $line);
}
}
foreach $pushDate (sort(keys(%patchHash))) {
print "$pushDate $patchHash{$pushDate}\n";
}