There are 3-4 main things that aptitude does and is good at -
a. Upgrading packages - $ sudo aptitude safe-upgrade -y
b. Installing packages - $ sudo aptitude install $PACKAGENAME
c. purging (removing package + configuration files - $ sudo aptitude purge $PACKAGENAME
Now all of aptitude exploits are written in /var/log/aptitude and its revolving gunzipped archives
┌─[shirish@debian] - [/var/log] - [10030]
└─[$] cat apt
apache2/ apt/ aptitude aptitude.1.gz aptitude.2.gz aptitude.3.gz aptitude.4.gz aptitude.5.gz aptitude.6.gz
Now I know that the data I'm looking for is probably in those aptitude logs. How do I tell aptitude to only show those packages which I installed anew rather than those installed as part of upgrades, any ideas anybody ?
apt list |grep installed |grep manual
(mind not to provide an argument on apt list) should return all installed packages marked as "manual" and should give a close indication on what are you looking to. – George Vasiliou Feb 22 '17 at 9:54[$] apt list | grep installed | grep manual [16:47:22] WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts. live-manual-pdf/testing,testing,unstable,unstable,now 2:20151217.1 all [installed]
– shirish Feb 22 '17 at 14:02