Re: How to find installed packages not in APT?

["Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com>]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2025 at 11:23:58AM -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 04, 2025 at 08:12:42 -0800, Mike Castle wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 4, 2025 at 4:04 AM Andrew M.A. Cater <amacater@einval.com> wrote:
> > > apt list '~o'
> > 
> > Where is '~o' documented?  apt(1) mentions dpkg-query, but I couldn't
> > find it mentioned there either.
> 
> It's documented as part of "aptitude", I believe, but it's not in the
> aptitude(8) man page, because that would be too easy.
> 

It's documented as part of aptitude and apt, yes.

> <https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/aptitude/aptitude.8.en.html>
> includes this paragraph (buried deep, searching for ~ eventually gets
> to it):
> 
>     This command accepts package names or patterns as arguments. If
>     the string contains a tilde character (“~”) or a question mark
>     (“?”), it will be treated as a search pattern and every package
>     matching the pattern will be considered (see the section “Search
>     Patterns” in the aptitude reference manual).
> 

I think it's just searching for a status matching ?o - so that matches
"obsolete", for example.

Trying it with '~i' gives you everything that is i[nstalled], by comparison.
That's a long list, going down to zstd.

aptitude list -h gives you more help detail.

Hope this helps - all the best, as ever,

Andrew Cater
(amacater@debian.org)

>