Re: checking whether a package is installed

[Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf@epkowa.co.jp>]

Aaron Maxwell <amaxwell@phy.ucsf.edu> writes:

> Is there a quick, elegant way to check if a particular package is
> installed?

dpkg -l <package>

You can use shell wildcards if you quote, e.g. dpkg -l 'dpkg-p*'.  This
gives (depending on your dpkg caches) something like

  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
  +++-==============-==============-============================================
  ii  dpkg-perl      0.1-3.0        Perl interface modules for dpkg
  pn  dpkg-python    <none>         (no description available)

from which you can easily see what is installed.  In my case I want
(column 1) and have (column 2) installed dpkg-perl.  The perl-python
package I want purged and is not installed.

Very quick, very elegant.  Not?
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen       Epson Kowa Corporation, Research and Development