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Avinash Raj
Asked: 2014-04-14 00:40:00 +0800 CST

How to list all the packages which are installed from PPAs?

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I installed many packages from many PPAs on my system. I want to list all the installed packages which are installed from launchpad PPAs, not repositories.

Is this possible through command-line?

command-line

6 Answers

  1. The following command returns the package name and its ppa (if installed from a ppa):

    apt-cache policy $(dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall$ | awk '{ print $1 }') | perl -e '@a = <>; $a=join("", @a); $a =~ s/\n(\S)/\n\n$1/g;  @packages = split("\n\n", $a); foreach $p (@packages) {print "$1: $2\n" if $p =~ /^(.*?):.*?500 http:\/\/ppa\.launchpad\.net\/(.*?)\s/s}'

    Details:

    • dpkg --get-selections gives only the installed packages after grep -v deinstall$
    • awk '{ print $1 }' returns only the package name
    • perl -e '@a = <>; $a=join("", @a)' concatenates all the lines returned by apt-cache policy
    • $a =~ s/\n(\S)/\n\n$1/g; adds a newline between each package section
    • @packages = split("\n\n", $a); is a perl array containing all the packages infos, one package per item.
    • foreach $p (@packages) {print "$1: $2\n" if $p =~ /^(.*?):.*?500 http:\/\/ppa\.launchpad\.net\/(.*?)\s/s} is a loop where the package and the ppa are printed if a ppa with prio 500 is found in the policy.
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  3. The source of an installed package can be checked using apt-cache, for example

    $ apt-cache policy oracle-java7-installer

    oracle-java7-installer:
  Installed: 7u51-0~webupd8~7
  Candidate: 7u51-0~webupd8~7
  Version table:
 *** 7u51-0~webupd8~7 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu/ precise/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

    The output of apt-cache policy <package_name> contains the source.

    One can use the following script to obtain the list of packages installed from PPAs.

    #!/bin/bash
echo "List of packages which are not installed from Ubuntu repository"
for i in `dpkg -l | grep "^ii" | awk '{print $2}'`
do
    j=`apt-cache policy "$i" | grep "ppa.launchpad.net"` 
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
        echo "$i"
        #echo "$i $j"
    fi
done
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  4. In accordance with this answer and this post, you can get a list of all packages from all the PPAs installed on your system using the following bash code:

    for APT in $(find /etc/apt/ -name \*.list); do
  grep -o "^deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/[a-z0-9\-]\+/[a-z0-9\-]\+" $APT | while read ENTRY ; do
    USER=$(echo $ENTRY | cut -d/ -f4)
    PPA=$(echo $ENTRY | cut -d/ -f5)
    awk '$1 == "Package:" { if (a[$2]++ == 0) print $2; }' /var/lib/apt/lists/*$USER*$PPA*Packages
    done
done

    And in accordance with this answer, you can get a list of all installed packages in your system using:

    dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall | cut -f1

    Now, let's join these two ideas to get a list of all the packages which are installed from PPAs:

    (for APT in $(find /etc/apt/ -name \*.list); do
  grep -o "^deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/[a-z0-9\-]\+/[a-z0-9\-]\+" $APT | while read ENTRY ; do
    USER=$(echo $ENTRY | cut -d/ -f4)
    PPA=$(echo $ENTRY | cut -d/ -f5)
    awk '$1 == "Package:" { if (a[$2]++ == 0) print $2; }' /var/lib/apt/lists/*$USER*$PPA*Packages
    done
done; dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall | cut -f1) | sort | awk 'dup[$0]++ == 1'
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  5. Install synaptic. You can then browse packages by "origin" or even any other custom filter.

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  6. I wanted to know how many packages I had from each ppa, so I slightly modified Sylvain's awesome answer:

    apt-cache policy $(dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall$ | awk '{ print $1 }') \
| perl -e '@a = <>; $a=join("", @a); $a =~ s/\n(\S)/\n\n$1/g;  @packages = split("\n\n", $a); foreach $p (@packages) {printf "%-40s %s\n", $2, $1 if $p =~ /^(.*?):.*?500 http:\/\/ppa\.launchpad\.net\/(.*?)\s/s}' \
| sort \
| uniq -c -w 40

    by printing ppa first and using only first 40 characters to count & deduplicate with uniq, I can get this kind of output:

      5 alexlarsson/flatpak/ubuntu               flatpak
147 bleedingedge/focal-bleed/ubuntu          bzip2
  1 justinabrahms/ttf-cascadia-code/ubuntu   ttf-cascadia-code
 44 libreoffice/ppa/ubuntu                   fonts-opensymbol
 71 savoury1/backports/ubuntu                bash
 41 savoury1/multimedia/ubuntu               dav1d
  8 strukturag/libheif/ubuntu                aom-tools
 12 ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable/ubuntu      gdal-bin
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