How do I get a list of obsolete packages?

Question

I'm trying to figure out a way to get a list of the packages that are no longer available in the repositories that I have enabled. This workstation has been through quite a few versions of Ubuntu and has had many 3rd party repositories added and removed. I'd like to get a list of software that I have from these removed repositories, so I can clean it up or add back the appropriate repositories.

Answer 1

aptitude search '~o'

Aptitude has some very powerful searching available. Unfortunately the syntax is a bit unwieldy and you have to dig past the manpage to find the documentation, but its worth it.

apt-show-versions can also be helpful:

apt-show-versions | grep 'No available version'

Answer 2

Starting with Ubuntu 19.10 it is also possible to run

apt list ?obsolete

to get the list of obsolete packages.

For any release you could use the following Bash one-liner:

comm -23 <(dpkg-query -W -f '${db:Status-Abbrev}\t${Package}\n' | grep '^.[^nc]' | cut -f2 | sort) <(apt-cache dumpavail | sed -rn 's/^Package: (.*)/\1/p' | sort -u)

No need to install extra packages for this, plus this is relatively fast. This will also find partially installed packages (but will not find those that have only configuration files remaining; that could be changed easily, though). Note: this does not care of which architecture the packages are.

If you want to include packages that have a different version installed than what is available from the repositories, you could you one of the following:

Use modern apt:

 apt list --installed | awk -F/ '/\[installed,local\]/{print $1}'

As for Bionic (and maybe for earlier releases) there is yet another option:

ubuntu-support-status --show-unsupported

read the package names under "No longer downloadable:" section.

If you use Focal or later release, you can use

ubuntu-security-status --unavailable

instead; you can read the package names below text "packages are no longer available for download". This is not the fastest option.

Answer 3

To get a list of apps that are not in a Registered Repository or PPA do this:

sudo apt-get install apt-show-versions
apt-show-versions | grep 'No available version'

That should output text like this:

app1 1.0.0.14 installed: No available version in archive
app23 0.3.6 installed: No available version in archive
app332 7.0.9377 installed: No available version in archive

For me this worked and showed three apps I installed using DEB packages and weren't available in a Repo or PPA.

Do remember though that it's impossible to check for all programs, only the ones that went through dpkg. For instance, some apps are installed by simply extracting them into the correct folders, or others use a standalone installer bin or script. So the best way is for you yourself to keep a list of apps you installed via any method other than APT.

Answer 4

If you have aptitude installed use,

aptitude search '?obsolete'

or its short form

aptitude search '~o'

Here it is a sample output

i A gcc-4.7-base - GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection (base package)
id  libdb4.7     - Berkeley v4.7 Database Libraries [runtime]
i   libudev0     - libudev shared library

The first character of each line indicates the current state of the package. The most common states are:

• p, meaning that no trace of the package exists on the system,
• c, meaning that the package was deleted but its configuration files remain on the system,
• i, meaning that the package is installed, and
• v, meaning that the package is virtual.

The second character indicates the stored action to be performed on the package, if any, otherwise a blank space is displayed. The most common actions are:

• i, meaning that the package will be installed,
• d, meaning that the package will be deleted, and
• p, meaning that the package and its configuration files will be removed.

If the third character is A, the package was automatically installed.

For a complete list of the possible state and action flags, see the section Accessing Package Information in the aptitude reference guide.

Answer 5

More info to investigate.

ubuntu-support-status 
echo "$(sudo apt-mark showmanual | wc -l) packages marked as 'manually installed'."

... ubuntu-support-status and apt-mark may require installation.

Answer 6

There may be a cleaner way, but off the top of my head you can do

dpkg -l | cut -f 3 -d ' ' > installed
xargs -n 1 --replace=X apt-cache search ^X$ < installed | cut -f 1 -d ' ' > available
diff installed available

Cleanup the first few lines of the installed file: it will have headers.

Bonus if anyone can fix my syntax highlighting...

Answer 7

As mentioned apt-get search is not a good method to check if a package is still available. Additional I've added everything to just one line:

for i in `dpkg -l | grep '^i' | awk '{ print $2 }'`; do apt-cache show $i > /dev/null || echo $i; done