Getting the list of packages manually installed by aptitude There are 3-4 main things that aptitude does and is good at - a. Upgrading packages - `$ sudo aptitude safe-upgrade -y` b. Installing packages - `$ sudo aptitude install $PACKAGENAME` c. purging (removing package + configuration files - `$ sudo aptitude purge $PACKAGENAME` Now all of aptitude exploits are written in /var/log/aptitude and its revolving gunzipped archives [shirish@debian] - [/var/log] - [10030] [$] cat apt apache2/ apt/ aptitude aptitude.1.gz aptitude.2.gz aptitude.3.gz aptitude.4.gz aptitude.5.gz aptitude.6.gz Now I know that the data I'm looking for is probably in those aptitude logs. How do I tell aptitude to only show those packages which I installed anew rather than those installed as part of upgrades, any ideas anybody ?

To list all packages installed through `aptitude` , you should run the following command:


cat /var/log/aptitude* | grep INSTALL]


**edit**

The follwing command will display the installed package with their dependencies:


cat /var/log/aptitude* | grep INSTALL


To exclude the `DEPENDENCIES` you can add the `]` or something like:


cat /var/log/aptitude* | grep INSTALL | egrep -v DEPENDENCIES


There is an example `emacs`:


[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] emacs24:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] emacs24-bin-common:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] emacs24-common:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libm17n-0:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libotf0:amd64
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] m17n-db:amd64
[INSTALL] emacs:amd64