Count number of Upgrades

[Armadillos]

Good morning,

Where does Ubuntu (et al) store information about the upgrades which are pending / required?

I want to write a script that will do an update regulalry and then work out how many packages need upgrading.

I did find a command a couple of months ago that did this on the Internet, but I am not able to find it again. it was something along the lines of:

<command> | grep "^u" | wc -l

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much, Russell