How to list currently not installed packages?

Question

I'd like to output a list of all currently not installed packages (they are visible in Synaptic for example) using only shell commands. How do I do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

aptitude search '!~i'

See the Search Term Reference in the aptitude user's manual for details.

Answer 2

From the question's tags, I assume a Debian system.

In Bash: aptitude search '!~i'. The list is very long (more than 30k lines).

It can be interesting to suppress virtual packages also: aptitude search '!~i !~v'

Answer 3

Type the command as follows:

# rpm -qa > list.txt

with this command you can check your installed RPM list after that you can easly to find which RPM is not installed.