HowTo: Create a list of installed packages

[ibjsb4]

All your GUI packages should be located in:

/usr/share/applications

[Redsandro]

Thanks. but I don't mean only GUI. Those are the easiest to remember.

During the course of a year you find a lot convenient applications, and you use them in your workflow, batch scripts, builds etc.
For example, image magick, doxygen, pandoc, different video tools.

I usually go through my list of packages to see if I can leave things out, but it's so annoying to go through a list of two thousand packages when it could be a list of two hundred applications. I'm probably exaggerating here.

But there are 'father' packages, on which nothing depends. Obviously, in theory it's possible to find out which they are. I am looking for such a way.

[oldfred]

With aptitude you can get top level only. But not for reinstall directly.

Top level only - no depends (not for reinstall)
sudo apt-get install aptitude
aptitude --disable-columns -F '%p' search '~i!~M!~R(~i)' > toplevel
or
aptitude search '?installed ?not(?reverse-depends(?installed))'

Alternative way with aptitude:
aptitude --display-format '%p' search '?installed!?automatic' > ~/my-packages
sudo xargs aptitude --schedule-only install < my-packages
sudo aptitude install

Top level applications:
aptitude --disable-columns -F 'no_dependents %p' search '~i!~M!~R(~i)'
sudo aptitude --disable-columns -F '%p' search '~i!~M!~R(~i)' >toplevelonly
aptitude --disable-columns -F 'no_dependents %p' search '~i!~M!~R(~i)'

[Redsandro]

This is golden:

aptitude --disable-columns -F '%p' search '~i!~M!~R(~i)'

Thank you.

But what do you mean by this?

no depends (not for reinstall)

Depends will automatically be installed, or the top level package won't be installed. Maybe this would actually be a safer way to reinstall those packages otherwise you might install dependency libraries and older libraries that were dependencies for an older version (when one generated the list).

[oldfred]

It just is a list without depends, but the list itself cannot directly be used to reinstall just the top level apps. Yes depends will then correctly be included.
I have seen some posts on using grep to parse a file to get just the needed file list in the proper format for dpkg to reinstall, but did not save it.
It looks like it just is the app, and you need the second parameter if using dpkg.

[Merrattic]

I find this works for me

cat /var/log/dpkg.log | grep " \install\ "

and see here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1952639

[Redsandro]

the list itself cannot directly be used to reinstall just the top level apps.

If you mean the newlines, it's rather trivial. This will work:

sudo apt-get install `cat packages.toplevel.list | tr '\n' ' '`

[Cynical]

I had created this thread a long time ago and basically forgot about it, which is why I hadn't replied to any of the questions here. I'm kind of amazed it grew so large and is still useful to people. It makes me very happy to read through all the comments about how it saved people half a days work. Anyway I was a far less experienced Linux user during that time so I didn't think to mention any caveats about using sudo or that it copies all packages, I was just excited to find something that worked for me. Cheers all.

[vasa1]

I had created this thread a long time ago and basically forgot about it, which is why I hadn't replied to any of the questions here. I'm kind of amazed it grew so large and is still useful to people. It makes me very happy to read through all the comments about how it saved people half a days work. Anyway I was a far less experienced Linux user during that time so I didn't think to mention any caveats about using sudo or that it copies all packages, I was just excited to find something that worked for me. Cheers all.

And thank you for "bumping" it. I had forgotten all about it but will now bookmark it very securely

[Muhammad_Ahmad_Mujtaba]

hello this thread is good but perhaps not so good for me!
I have created installed-software but when i try to install them on fresh ubuntu 14.04 alot of dpkg-errors happen!
for example:
dpkg: warning: package not in database at line 1638: xtrans-dev
dpkg: warning: package not in database at line 1652: zlib1g:i386
dpkg: warning: package not in database at line 1652: zlib1g-dev:amd64

how to resolve this?