On Wed, 15 May 1996, Maarten Boekhold wrote:
> I always thought that 'dpkg -l' was supposed to show you all *installed*
> packages, but, when I do a: dpkg -l 'ncurses*' on my system, I get:
>
> Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
> | Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
> |/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=bDesired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
> | 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
> +++-===============-==============-============================================
> un ncurses <unknown> (no description available)
> [...remainder deleted...]
>
> Of these packages, all with a version of <unknown> are not installed, and
> I don't want these to show up either. They're confusing me.
>
> What can I do about this?
pipe it through grep to get rid of the lines that you dont want.
$ dpkg -l 'ncurses*' | grep "^ii\|^Desired=Unknown\|^|\|+++"
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
| 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 ncurses-base 1.9.9e-1 Video terminal manipulation: Minimum set of
ii ncurses-bin 1.9.9e-1 Video terminal manipulation: associated prog
ii ncurses-term 1.9.9e-1 Video terminal manipulation: additional term
ii ncurses3.0 1.9.9e-1 Video terminal manipulation: shared librarie
ii ncurses3.0-dev 1.9.9e-1 Video terminal manipulation: Developer's lib
ii ncurses3.0-pic 1.9.9e-1 Video terminal manipulation: Shared-library
or just 'dpkg -l "ncurses*" | grep -v "<unknown>"' might do it, but this
would fail on packages which aren't "<unknown>" but which have failed to
install.
If you just want the installed packages, without the header info:
dpkg -l "ncurses*" | grep "^ii"
If you do this a lot, write a shell alias (bash aliases can't handle
arguments, unfortunately), function or shell script to do it for you.
NOTE: be wary of shell functions (and aliases too)...even if you define
them in your ~/.bashrc so that they are available from the command
line, they will NOT be exutable to programs forked by the shell. e.g. a
function is not available in situations like 'find . -blahblah | xargs
myfunction". xargs will have no idea what "myfunction" is. If you need
to be able to call it from another program then write a script.
Craig
