Diffenerce between apt list and apt ---installed

General Discussion
1

Running BBB on 32G microSD. I want to install man pages.
When I type apt list --installed | grep manpage, The list is empty
When I type apt list | grep manpage, It shows about 30 packages. For example:

  • erlang-manpages/oldstable 1:23.2.6+dfsg-1+deb11u1 all
  • freebsd-manpages/oldstable 12.2-1 all
  • manpages-de-dev/oldstable 4.10.0-1 all
  • manpages-de/oldstable 4.10.0-1 all
  • manpages-dev/oldstable 5.10-1 all
  • manpages-es-dev/oldstable 4.10.0-1 all
  • manpages-es/oldstable 4.10.0-1 all

Basically, what are these non-installed packages? Are they taking up disk space?

2

Just use dpkg’s version…

dpkg --list manpages*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name              Version      Architecture Description
+++-=================-============-============-==================================================
ii  manpages          6.03-2       all          Manual pages about using a GNU/Linux system
un  manpages-de       <none>       <none>       (no description available)
ii  manpages-dev      6.03-2       all          Manual pages about using GNU/Linux for development
un  manpages-fr       <none>       <none>       (no description available)
un  manpages-fr-extra <none>       <none>       (no description available)
un  manpages-pl       <none>       <none>       (no description available)

First 2 letters will tell you what state it is in…

Regards,

3

dpkg --list manpages* shows status un. (Not installed)

In general, I am try to understand the difference between an uninstalled package and a installed package. Being new to debian/linux, I do not understand why I would have non-installed packages?

Are non-installed package just a list of packages that are compatible with my system that can be downloaded and installed?

4

Correct.

$apt-cache search tools | grep dev

After “search” add what you are looking for with or without wildcard *
Vertical bar is the *nix piping command, this “pipes” the output of that command into grep that further sorts the results and will highlight and display lines with the word “dev”

5

Think of it both ways… list of Installed and a list of packages you could install.

In the end it’s just a database file with a flag - installed, - not installed

Regards,

6

Thanks,

That clears things up.