Craig Dickson wrote: > /var/lib/dpkg/available seems to be the right thing. I can grep for all the > "Filename:" lines, use sed to throw out all but the actual filenames, then > grep the resulting file for all the .debs I have, one by one. Any .deb that > isn't in the list isn't currently avaialable, and is therefore presumably out > of date, and therefore a candidate for the Lost Packages site.
This almost works. I have one more question. For some packages, the actual filename is not the same as what's listed in /var/lib/dpkg/avail. For example, the current anti-aliasing-howto package is listed in avail as: anti-aliasing-howto_2.2.8_all.deb However, the file in my /var/cache/apt/archives directory is: anti-aliasing-howto_4%3a2.2.8_all.deb Note the extra 4%3a mysteriously inserted at the beginning of the package version. I assume the %3a is intended to represent the ':' character in hexadecimal, but why is it there at all? I can work around it easily enough with a trivial sed script, but I'm puzzled by it and wondered if anyone could explain it. Thanks, Craig