How to obtain list of installed packages

[Tom H]

On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 6:58 PM, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/05/2016, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 2:05 PM, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 11/05/2016, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Ralf Mardorf <silver.bullet at zoho.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, 11 May 2016 12:06:29 +0200, Tom H wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The best answer's the one that proposed an aptitude search because it
>>>>>> returned the list of packages that were installed specifically rather
>>>>>> than automatically.
>>>>>
>>>>> this isn't a good advice.
>>>>>
>>>>> A pitfall could be that some packages are installed with the
>>>>> recommended packages, but others were not installed with recommended
>>>>> packages. This is important even when installing the same Ubuntu
>>>>> release and fails when following your advice Tom.
>>>>
>>>> Not at all.
>>>>
>>>> You can run "aptitude -F %p search '?narrow(?installed,!?automatic)'"
>>>> (or "aptitude -F %p search '~S ~i !~M'") to get the list of packages
>>>> that were installed manually.
>>>
>>> Ah, no.
>>>
>>> Because, after I installed aptitude (it was not installed, when I
>>> first tried to run the command), and, again ran that command, as
>>> shown, it listed all kinds of packages that I had no knowledge of
>>> installing.
>>
>> Don't be ridiculous!
>>
>> Did you install "apt"? Isn't it installed?
>>
>> How about "acl", "adduser", "anacron", "apparmor", "apport", ...? (And
>> these are the As that I can remember off-hand.)
>>
>
> That has absolutely nothing to do with the topic.
>
> The last paragraph of the post to which I had replied, above, is
> completely misleading.
>
> "
>>>> You can run "aptitude -F %p search '?narrow(?installed,!?automatic)'"
>>>> (or "aptitude -F %p search '~S ~i !~M'") to get the list of packages
>>>> that were installed manually.
> "
>
> That is absolute rubbish.
>
> The packages that you named specifically;
>
> "
>> Don't be ridiculous!
>>
>> Did you install "apt"? Isn't it installed?
>>
>> How about "acl", "adduser", "anacron", "apparmor", "apport", ...? (And
>> these are the As that I can remember off-hand.)
> "
>
> WERE NOT MANUALLY INSTALLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> "
> "
>>>> You can run "aptitude -F %p search '?narrow(?installed,!?automatic)'"
>>>> (or "aptitude -F %p search '~S ~i !~M'") to get the list of packages
>>>> that were installed manually.
> "
> "
>
> Why do you not try to be helpful, instead of setting out to be nasty
> and deliberately wasting people's time with your nastiness?

Your understanding and skills are lacking. So you should ask for help
rather than say "it doesn't work."

Assume that you have two systems, A and B, both installed from an
Ubuntu desktop iso.

You then install, manually and over the course of a week or two, 100
packages on A that pull in another 500 dependencies and you'd like to
install the same packages on B.

You run "aptitude -F %p search '?narrow(?installed,!?automatic)'" on A
to get the list of all manually installed packages, by you or the
installer.

You then install that list of packages on B. Those that aren't
installed will be installed and those already installed will not.

An example of installing an already installed (and up-to-date) package:

# apt-get install apt
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
apt is already the newest version (1.2.10ubuntu1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.