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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 ?

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  • 1
    What does “installed as part of bicycle” mean? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 21 '17 at 23:54
  • @Giles - oops, gypsies at work, have fixed it now, thank you. – shirish Feb 22 '17 at 1:20
  • Gypsies at work? – schaiba Feb 22 '17 at 9:00
  • As far as i know, apt marks installed packages by user as manual. running 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
  • nope that doesn't work I get [$] 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
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To list all packages installed through aptitude , you should run the following command:

cat /var/log/aptitude* | grep INSTALL]

edit

The follwing command will display the installed package with their dependencies:

cat /var/log/aptitude* | grep INSTALL

To exclude the DEPENDENCIES you can add the ] or something like:

cat /var/log/aptitude* | grep INSTALL | egrep -v DEPENDENCIES

There is an example emacs:

[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] emacs24:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] emacs24-bin-common:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] emacs24-common:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libm17n-0:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libotf0:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] m17n-db:amd64
[INSTALL] emacs:amd64
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  • I did get a few but not sure that's the whole story though because the results are very few. Also I wonder if this is enough cat /var/log/aptitude* | grep INSTALL no need for the extra ] get the same results. For some reason I don't think all the aptitude gunzipped archives are being parsed otherwise would surely have got more results, is there a way to figure out from where the result came, which aptitude* for e.g. ? – shirish Feb 22 '17 at 14:05
  • the cat /var/log/aptitude* | grep INSTALL will display the installed package with its dependiencies , the ] to excluse the dependencies – GAD3R Feb 22 '17 at 14:09

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