apt-list is a small utility that gives me something like “fink list” gave me when i ran fink on macosx, i.e., a summary listing of available (via apt-get(8)) packages, with the one line description of each package, with an indication of installed files (‘i’ if up-to-date; ‘I’ if there is an upgrade available – both in column 1).
apt-list requires both apt-cache(8) and apt(8). (my sense is that the latter is newer.)
someday there should be some argument parsing, probably to restrict the output to show only installed and/or installed, need upgrading, files, plus maybe a search term (though, for both of those, grep(1) works fine).
caveats:
- there are various “half-installed” states i’ve never seen, and so i don’t know how this will work for that.
- as you’ll see in your output, apt(8) produces a warning that it its output format is likely not stable; if its output format changes, apt-list will likely break.
enjoy.