Re: Checking what's installed

[Kevin McKinley <ronin2@bellatlantic.net>]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 10:40:22 +0900
Nick Hastings <hastings@bmail.kek.jp> wrote:

> I beg to differ:
> 
> hastings@twofish ~ 9%  dpkg -l | grep -v ^ii | wc
>     126     952    8173
> 
> Seems there are 126 that are not both installed and desired. It shows
> all the packages that it knows about. 

The man dpkg man page agrees with you more than with me:

  dpkg -l | --list package-name-pattern ...
              List packages matching given pattern. If  no  pack­
              age-name-pattern  is  given,  list  all packages in
              /var/lib/dpkg/available.   

On the other hand, here's what it looks like on one of my machines:

ronin@cypher:~$ dpkg -l |wc
    163    1323   11470
ronin@cypher:~$ dpkg -l |grep -v ^ii |wc
      5      12     321
ronin@cypher:~$ dpkg -l |grep -v ^ii    
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err:
uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version        Description
+++-==============-==============-==========================================

In other words, on my machine dpkg reports only the installed packages.

But that's NOT all the packages in .../available:

cypher:/home/ronin# dselect update
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main Packages
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main Release
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Merging Available information
Replacing available packages info, using /var/cache/apt/available.
Information about 779 package(s) was updated.
cypher:/home/ronin# dpkg -l |wc
    163    1323   11470
cypher:/home/ronin#      

I'm not sure why that is.

Kevin