apt-get History

There is a useful command line tool available for viewing a list of packages installed, without using aptitude or synaptics. To get ahold of this tool, run the following on a Debian installation:

apt-get install apt-show-versions

Once installed, type at your command line:

apt-show-versions

Depending on how you configured your system, you may get anywhere from 5 to 25000 packages dumped. These are the packages installed using apt-get, not the total count of packages on your machine. If you use other methods of installing packages, like an rpm port or by source build, you will have inaccuracies.

To view a count of packages that could be installed on your system, run the following command:

grep Package: /var/lib/apt/lists/*Packages | wc -l

This example normally returns a number above 15000. On my machine it returned 17252. You can change the wc -l part to one of head, tail, or more (possibly even less), depending on how you feel.

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More About apt

apt is a front-end for dpkg, which is the basic Debian package manager. The command-line front-end for apt itself is apt-get, which comes with the apt package. Also available are the front-ends aptitude, synaptics, gnome-apt, and wajig.

Basically, the way the system works is thus: