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KonradDos
Asked: 2017-03-25 07:25:50 +0800 CST

Date of install regular programs while installing system

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I need to know how to find date of install program which was pre-installed in system. For example: How to find date of pre-installed firefox? I need to see the date it was installed on my system.

user-data

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can run the following:

    cat /var/log/apt/history.log | grep -B 2 firefox

    And it'll show you the dates of installations/upgrades/removals. Note that if your log is very large, it will be rotated and archived in a file like /var/log/apt/history.log.1.gz

    Unfortunately this doesn't show if it was installed during system installation. This information is much harder to get. You can view the modified date of the firefox binary, but that may have been modified afterwards, by an upgrade for example.

    It's safe to assume that if it's not in the history.log files, that it was installed with the OS. You can check a few things here.

    First,

    `sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sda1 | grep 'Filesystem created:'`

    This will show you when the filesystem was created, but, if you reinstalled Ubuntu at some point and left the filesytem intact, it will still show the original date. So this is not really good.

    Second,

    `ls -lt /var/log/installer`

    will show oldest file on the bottom. If the package is not in the very first cat command at the top of this answer, then it's safe to assume it was installed with the system, on the last date found using the ls command above. Having the FileSystem date and the last date on the bottom of the ls command match, will confirm the date even more.

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  2. I think I'd try something based on grepping the (possibly compressed) dpkg log files e.g.

    $ zgrep -h 'firefox:' /var/log/dpkg.log* | awk '$3 == "install"'
2016-04-20 22:11:24 install firefox:amd64 <none> 45.0.2+build1-0ubuntu1

    If you want to see install/upgrade history you can do 

    $ zgrep -h 'firefox:' /var/log/dpkg.log* | awk '$3 ~ /install|upgrade/' | sort -V
2016-04-20 22:11:24 install firefox:amd64 <none> 45.0.2+build1-0ubuntu1
2016-06-30 05:13:54 upgrade firefox:amd64 45.0.2+build1-0ubuntu1 47.0+build3-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
2016-08-06 14:44:58 upgrade firefox:amd64 47.0+build3-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 48.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
2016-09-22 12:20:53 upgrade firefox:amd64 48.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 49.0+build4-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
2016-10-28 22:45:23 upgrade firefox:amd64 49.0+build4-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 49.0.2+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.2
2016-11-19 04:04:10 upgrade firefox:amd64 49.0.2+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.2 50.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.2
2016-12-01 06:23:14 upgrade firefox:amd64 50.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.2 50.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
2016-12-14 17:49:47 upgrade firefox:amd64 50.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 50.1.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
2017-01-28 06:17:13 upgrade firefox:amd64 50.1.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 51.0.1+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
2017-02-07 02:17:49 upgrade firefox:amd64 51.0.1+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 51.0.1+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.2
2017-03-08 05:34:34 upgrade firefox:amd64 51.0.1+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.2 52.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
2017-03-21 07:17:49 upgrade firefox:amd64 52.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 52.0.1+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
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