Re: Find obsolete packages without using aptitude?

[Fredrik Jonson <fredrik@jonson.org>]

Jörg-Volker Peetz wrote:
>  Bob Proulx wrote on 01/14/2015 06:25:
> > Fredrik Jonson wrote:
> > > I'm trying to find obsolete packages on a system that's been
> > > dist-upgraded. How would you [do that without using] aptitude?
> > 
> > Try this:
> > 
> >   apt-show-versions | grep -v uptodate
> 
>  This doesn't show all the results "aptitude search ~o" finds on my system
>  [...] This shell command works for me:
> 
>  awk '/^Package: / {print $2}' /var/lib/dpkg/status | sort |
>  (awk '/^Package: / {print $2}' /var/lib/apt/lists/*_Packages | sort |
>  comm -23 --nocheck-order /dev/fd/3 -) 3<&0

Interesting. The shell command above indeed does include more packages that
are obsolete on my system too.

As far as I can tell the difference is that your awk command includes packages
that have been removed but not purged, while apt-show-versions ignores 
non-purged packages that have only config files left.

-- 
Fredrik Jonson