Have aptitude search print full package name _Environment: aptitude called in a script._ I'm having problems with this command: aptitude search '?virtual' |grep ^v |grep -v i386|sort|uniq In particular if I do: aptitude search '?virtual' |grep ^v |grep -v i386|sort|uniq|grep adblock I get (as one of the results): v adblock-plus-element-hiding-hel - instead of what I want: v adblock-plus-element-hiding-helper - How do I get aptitude to print the full package name in a script?

You need to tell `aptitude` not do do any special column formatting.

> \--disable-columns
>
> This option causes **aptitude search** and **aptitude versions** to output their results without any special formatting. In particular: normally aptitude will add whitespace or truncate search results in an attempt to fit its results into vertical “columns”. With this flag, each line will be formed by replacing any format escapes in the format string with the corresponding text; column widths will be ignored.

So do this instead:


$ aptitude search '?virtual' --disable-columns|grep ^v |grep -v i386|sort|uniq
v a52dec -
v a52dec-dev -
v aac-tactics -
v aalib1 -
v aalib-bin -
v acl-dev -
v ada-compiler -
v aide-binary -
v alphy -
...