How do find multiply installed packages?

sds

10/24/23, 10:42 PM

I just discovered that I have both gcc-10and gcc-11 installed (and did apt purge gcc-10 && apt autoremove).

I wonder what other packages I might have that are installed in multiple versions?

PS. It appears that gcc-12 exists too, but apt install gcc-12 && apt purge gcc-11 fails because of unmet dependencies)

1 + 3

package-management

sds

10/24/23, 11:13 PM

@Nmath: the package system is supposed to take care of dependencies, so there should never be any breakage from `apt purge ...`. OTOH, the more unused packages you have, the more possibilities for damage/conflicts. I want to keep only what I use.

Nmath

10/24/23, 11:16 PM

See: [How to list all installed packages](https://askubuntu.com/q/17823). By the same logic that apt is supposed to take care of dependencies, then that package must exist on your system for some reason. My suggestion is to make backups and proceed with caution.

sds

10/25/23, 2:29 PM

@Nmath: yes, there are many ways to list _all_ packages. This is _not_ the question. I am asking how to detect the same piece of software installed multiple times with different versions. E.g., both `gcc-10` & `gcc-11` or `emacs-22` & `emacs-23`.

Score:0

Ubuntu

sds

10/25/23, 2:52 PM

Here is what I ended up using:

import subprocess as sp

versioned = {}
with sp.Popen(["apt","list","--installed"], encoding="ascii",
              stdout=sp.PIPE, stderr=sp.STDOUT) as pipe:
    for pack in pipe.stdout:
        if "/" not in pack:
            print(pack)
            continue
        name = pack.split("/",1)[0]
        name_ver = name.rsplit("-",1)
        if len(name_ver) == 2 and name_ver[1].isdigit():
            versioned.setdefault(name_ver[0],set()).add(name_ver[1])

print(f"found {len(versioned):,d} versioned packages")
versioned = {n:v for n,v in versioned.items() if len(v) > 1}
print(f"found {len(versioned):,d} packages with multiple versions:\n{versioned}")

which prints

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.



Listing...

found 240 versioned packages
found 3 packages with multiple versions:
{'cpp': {'12', '11'}, 'g++': {'12', '11'}, 'gcc': {'12', '11'}}

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