(Sorry about the long lines but they illustrate the output I'm
talking about.)
``dpkg -l'' on its own in a terminal produces wide output, e.g.:
$ dpkg -l perl*
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 perl 5.8.3-3 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report Language.
....
but when I send its output to a pipe or a file, I get narrow
output:
$ dpkg -l perl* |head
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 perl 5.8.3-3 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report
....
I want to dump a complete list of installed packages to a file as
part of my backup procedure. man dpkg-query suggests using
--showformat=format, in particular: "Package information can be
included by inserting variable references to package fields using
the ${var[;width]} syntax." But it doesn't say what the variable
names are. Suggestions?
Thanks,
Adam