Charlie Harvey

Debian Tip: Get a list of all installed packages with dpkg

Written by Charlie on

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I like to make sure that I always have a listing of all the files I have on my Debian boxen. Fortunately dpkg has a quick way of doing just that. # dpkg --get-selections > /path/to/mybackup.txt I run that once a day or so as a cron job dumping to a file, that file will be in my usual rsync backup. That means that if my harddrive dies I can simply # dpkg --set-selections < /path/to/mybackup.txt # apt-get -u dselect-upgrade to have a full restore of all my packages.


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