| dpkg-query(1) | dpkg suite | dpkg-query(1) |
dpkg-query - a tool to query the dpkg database
dpkg-query [option...] command
dpkg-query is a tool to show information about packages listed in the dpkg database.
dpkg-query -l 'libc6*'
The first three columns of the output show the desired action, the package status, and errors, in that order.
Desired action:
Package status:
Error flags:
An uppercase status or error letter indicates the package is likely to cause severe problems. Please refer to dpkg(1) for information about the above states and flags.
The output format of this option is not configurable, but varies automatically to fit the terminal width. It is intended for human readers, and is not easily machine-readable. See -W (--show) and --showformat for a way to configure the output format.
The default output format gives one line per matching package, each line consisting of the package name and its installed version, separated by a tab. The package name will be architecture qualified for packages with a Multi-Arch field with the value same or with a foreign architecture, which is an architecture that is neither the native one nor all.
Each file diversion is printed on its own line after its diverted file, prefixed with one of the following localized strings:
locally diverted to: diverted-to
package diverts others to: diverted-to
diverted by pkg to: diverted-to
Hint: When machine parsing the output, it is customary to set the locale to C.UTF-8 to get reproducible results.
This command will not list extra files created by maintainer scripts, nor will it list alternatives.
Warning: this command is deprecated as it gives direct access to the internal dpkg database, please switch to use --control-list and --control-show instead for all cases where those commands might give the same end result. Although, as long as there is still at least one case where this command is needed (i.e. when having to remove a damaging postrm maintainer script), and while there is no good solution for that, this command will not get removed.
If the first character in the filename-search-pattern is none of ‘*[?/’ then it will be considered a substring match and will be implicitly surrounded by ‘*’ (as in *filename-search-pattern*). If the subsequent string contains any of ‘*[?\’, then it will handled like a glob pattern, otherwise any trailing ‘/’ or ‘/.’ will be removed and a literal path lookup will be performed.
This command will not list extra files created by maintainer scripts, nor will it list alternatives.
The output format consists of one line per matching pattern, with a list of packages owning the pathname separated by a comma (U+002C ‘,’) and a space (U+0020 ‘ ’), followed by a colon (U+003A ‘:’) and a space, followed by the pathname. As in:
pkgname1, pkgname2: pathname1
pkgname3: pathname2
File diversions are printed with the following localized strings:
diversion by pkgname from: diverted-from
diversion by pkgname to: diverted-to
or for local diversions:
local diversion from: diverted-from
local diversion to: diverted-to
Hint: When machine parsing the output, it is customary to set the locale to C.UTF-8 to get reproducible results.
Users of APT-based frontends should use apt show package-name instead as the available file is only kept up-to-date when using dselect.
In the format string, “\” introduces escapes:
“\” before any other character suppresses any special meaning of the following character, which is useful for “\” and “$”.
Package information can be included by inserting variable references to package fields using the syntax “${field[;width]}”. Fields are printed right-aligned unless the width is negative in which case left alignment will be used. The following fields are recognized but they are not necessarily available in the status file (only internal fields or fields stored in the binary package end up in it):
The following are virtual fields, generated by dpkg-query from values from other fields (note that these do not use valid names for fields in control files):
The default format string is “${binary:Package}\t${Version}\n”. Actually, all other fields found in the status file (i.e. user defined fields) can be requested, too. They will be printed as-is, though, no conversion nor error checking is done on them. To get the name of the dpkg maintainer and the installed version, you could run:
dpkg-query -f='${binary:Package} ${Version}\t${Maintainer}\n' \
-W dpkg
| 2023-05-11 | 1.21.22 |