List installed packages on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Objective

The objective of this article is to provide an Ubuntu user with information on how to list installed packages on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Operating System and Software Versions

  • Operating System: – Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

Requirements

Privileged access to your Ubuntu System as root or via sudo command may be required.

Conventions

  • # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
  • $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Other Versions of this Tutorial

Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)

Instructions

There are several ways on how to list installed packages on Ubuntu 18.04 Linux. First, we will show how to list installed packages relevant to your graphical user interface (GUI).

After that we will see how to list installed packages using command line. Command line in this case is much more powerful tool to use as it will list all installed packages.

List installed packages using GUI

To list installed packages on a Ubuntu 18.04 running a default graphical interface GNOME navigate to Activities and search for term software:

Ubuntu software

Click on the Ubuntu Software icon.

Installed packages tab

Click on Installed tab to list installed packages.

Keep reading if you wish to list all installed packages on your Ubuntu 18.04.



List installed packages using command line

Using command line will give user more precise results. There are several ways how to list installed packages on Ubuntu system. The first tool we are going to look at is apt. The below apt command will list all installed packages as well as its version number:

$ apt list --installed

Alternative to the above command is the dpkg command. The next command will list installed packages, including version number, architecture and short package description:

$ dpkg -l | grep ^ii

The following linux command will count all installed packages:

$ dpkg -l | grep ^ii | wc -l
495

Note, if you are searching for a particular package name, then use grep command to search for its name. For example let’s search for a package wget to see whether it is installed:

$ dpkg -l | grep ^ii | grep -i wget
ii  wget       1.19.4-1ubuntu2           amd64     retrieves files from the web

If the above command does not produce any output it means that the wget package is not installed yet.