How to find packages installed/updated yesterday?

Dear Lazyweb,

since yesterday’s daily update, my laptop runs really sluggish. Is there a way to list all packages which where updated or installed yesterday to track down the problem?

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16 Responses to “How to find packages installed/updated yesterday?”

  1. Jonathan Says:

    One way would be to take a look in /var/cache/apt/archives and look for .deb-files that have been created in the last day. That assumes that you didn’t clean up those yet, of course - but by default, they might still be there.

  2. Jonathan Says:

    Sure, take a look at /var/log/dpkg.log

  3. Adrian von Bidder Says:

    I’ve found /var /log/dpkg.log and especially /var/log/aptitude to be quite readable.

  4. ao2 Says:

    $PAGER /var/log/aptitude

  5. pinotree Says:

    Hmm, maybe
    - /var/log/apt/term.log
    - /var/log/aptitude
    - /var/log/dpkg.log
    ?

  6. Jan Hudec Says:

    Well, there are a couple of options:

    If you are using etckeeper, it includes the list of installed/removed packages including versions in the log for commit it does in apt hook.

    If you use some kind of intrusion detection system (like aide), it will tell you which files changed, so you can guess form that.

    Otherwise if you didn’t clear the apt cache, try looking at the .deb files in the cache for which were downloaded yesterday.

    I don’t think apt would keep any log, unfortunately and I’d recommend using etckeeper anyway. It was very helpful for debugging various upgrade-related breakages to me, both telling me what got upgraded (when libgl upgraded to version incompatible with installer X server) and providing old version of configs (when I needed to switch X drivers (free and non-free) and they required different sets of options).

  7. kuLa Says:

    It’s v easy, use ex. below just replace date by which you need:

    awk ‘$1==”2010-01-22″ && $4==”installed” {print $5}’ /var/log/dpkg.log

  8. devil Says:

    grep 2010-01-25 /var/log/dpkg.log | grep ” installed” will also do

  9. kuLa Says:

    yee but try to do ‘|xargs apt-get –purge remove -y’ on syntax with 2 greps :-)

  10. Anonymous Says:

    Others already mentioned dpkg.log and /var/log/aptitude. If you have some notion of what package you see misbehavior in, but you don’t know the cause, try “which-pkg-broke” from debian-goodies. “which-pkg-broke foo” shows the entire dependency chain of foo, sorted by recency of updates.

  11. Steve Kemp Says:

    I mostly just run “ls -ltr /usr/share/doc | tail -n 20″..

  12. Markus Hochholdinger Says:

    IMHO the direct and none error-prone way:
    ls -ltr /var/lib/dpkg/info/

  13. Übersicht installierter Pakete Says:

    [...] blog.venthur.de wurde jetzt eine ähnliche Frage gestellt, hier findet man in den Kommentaren eine recht schöne [...]

  14. Cywhale Says:

    Zwar aus dem Ubuntu-Wiki, sollte aber auch funktionieren: find /var/lib/dpkg/info/ -daystart \( -name \*.list -a -mtime -3 \) | \
    sed 's#.list$##;s#.*/##' | sort

    Habe erst gestern einen Artikel zu genau dem Thema geschrieben, o.g. gibt dir z.B. die installierten Pakete der letzten 3 Tage aus und ist eine “erweiterte” Variante von Markus’ Einzeiler.

  15. Peng’s links for Sunday, 31 January « I’m Just an Avatar Says:

    [...] Venthur: How to find packages installed/updated yesterday? If you’re like me you take regular updates to the software you run and every now and then you [...]

  16. Alvis Says:

    IMHO the direct and none error-prone way:
    ls -lr4 /var/lib/dpkh/info/;

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