In this brief post, I’ll quickly show you how to check via the terminal if a particular program is installed on an Ubuntu Linux system.
For easy understanding, I will consider a program that is already installed (keepassx) on my computer and one that is not installed nmap.
On the terminal, there are two reliable ways to find out if a program is installed on an Ubuntu or Linux Mint system: Via apt-cache policy or by running dpkg.
apt-cache policy Method
The below output shows the popular open source password manager keepassx is installed.
gestalt@masha ~ $ apt-cache policy keepassx keepassx: Installed: 2.0.2-1 Candidate: 2.0.2-1 Version table: *** 2.0.2-1 500 500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
Let’s now run the apt-cache policy command with nmap (a program not installed on my system).
gestalt@masha ~ $ apt-cache policy nmap nmap: Installed: (none) Candidate: 7.01-2ubuntu2 Version table: 7.01-2ubuntu2 500 500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
The above output shows the security scanner program nmap is not installed.
dpkg -l Method
Now let’s consider the dpkg -l method.
gestalt@masha ~ $ dpkg -l | grep keepassx ii keepassx 2.0.2-1 amd64 Cross Platform Password Manager
Voila, there you have it.
The above output shows that the password manager keepassx is installed on my system.
Let’s run dpkg -l again and look at the not-installed program nmap now.
gestalt@masha ~ $ dpkg -l | grep namp gestalt@masha
Since I have not installed nmap on my computer, I did not get any output.
I performed the above tests on a Linux Mint 18 (a derivative of Ubuntu) computer running the Cinnamon desktop 3.0.7 and the 4.4.0-21-generic x86_64 (64 bit) kernel.
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