File listing all the manually installed packages?

[Adam Funk]

On 2014-05-10, Tom H wrote:

> On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 4:41 PM, Adam Funk <a24061 at ducksburg.com> wrote:
>> On 2014-05-09, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
>>> On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 02:55:52PM +0100, Adam Funk wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Is there a file on an Ubuntu system that I can grep to find all the
>>>> manually installed packages?
>>>>
>>>> Normally I'd expect grep the output of dpkg or aptitude for this sort
>>>> of thing, but the machine in question died; I copied the entire hard
>>>> drive onto a USB drive & need the information to make sure I reinstall
>>>> Ubuntu (for someone else) on the new machine without anything missing.
>>>
>>> Have you tried the --admindir option on dpgk-query?  The man page
>>> suggests (to me, anyway) that you could access the db from the old
>>> disk.
>>>
>>>        --admindir=dir
>>>               Change the location of the dpkg database. The  default
>>>               location
>>>               is /var/lib/dpkg.
>>
>> Excellent!  Unfortunately, AFAICT, dpkg -l doesn't have any way to
>> distinguish manually & automatically installed packages, & what I'd
>> really like is a list of purely the manually installed ones.  I've
>> come across 'aptitude search '!~M ~i' --- is it possible to point that
>> at an alternative location for '/var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates', for
>> example?
>
> -S /path/to/pkgstates

Thanks, I'll file that for next time (I used the chroot solution).