saving package list

[Derek Broughton]

Martin Laberge wrote:

> On Tuesday 26 August 2008 13:20:46 Willy K. Hamra wrote:
>> 
>> i found a lot of websites explaining how to save the list of installed
>> packages, to be used after a fresh install for example. there is a lot
>> of packages that i don't want to install, i can simply delete their
>> names from the list, but their dependencies will still get installed,
>> and as far as i understand, apt will consider them manually installed
>> packages, so i don't think "apt-get autoremove" will remove them, or am
>> i wrong? in which case, it's all i need to know :P
> 
> In fact, what you (and I too) would want is a list of APPLICATIONS
> installed, without all their dependencies. Not a list of Packages.
> 
> If someone know a method to do this, I would use it too...

I post this just about monthly.  IF you do installs with aptitude (I can't
vouch for it working any other way):

 aptitude search '~i !~M' | tr -s ' ' | cut -f 2 -d ' ' 

will return a lovely list of all the _manually_ installed packages - no
dependencies.

The first part says show the Installed (Manual) packages, 'tr' eliminates
excess spaces, and cut finds just the second word (the package name).
-- 
derek