Find out if package is installed in Linux

Posted on in Categories , , , , last updated February 10, 2007

The command to finding out if package is installed in Linux is depend upon your Linux distribution. Following are commands for different distributions.

Jump to your distribution:
* Debian / Ubuntu Linux

* Red Hat / Fedora Linux / Cent OS / Suse Linux

Debian / Ubuntu Linux

Use dpkg command, which is package manager for Debian. Suppose you want to find out package apache-perl or sudo is installed or not, type command:
$ dpkg -s apache-perl
OR
$ dpkg -s sudo
Output:

Package: sudo
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 396
Maintainer: Bdale Garbee 
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.6.8p12-4
Replaces: sudo-ldap
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.5-1), libpam0g (>= 0.76), libpam-modules
Conflicts: sudo-ldap
Conffiles:
/etc/pam.d/sudo e3aaa79c2a00244cdfd17117127f8993
/etc/init.d/sudo 64f882a713108e70dc6133444177281f
Description: Provide limited super user privileges to specific users
Sudo is a program designed to allow a sysadmin to give limited root
privileges to users and log root activity.  The basic philosophy is to give
as few privileges as possible but still allow people to get their work done.
.
This version is built with minimal shared library dependencies, use the
sudo-ldap package instead if you need LDAP support.

Use file /var/lib/dpkg/available to find out all package names available to you. Or you can use following command (list all packages in /var/lib/dpkg/status):
$ dpkg-query -l
You can also try to match package name using wild cards:
$ dpkg-query -l 'libc6*'
Once you’ve found package name, use the following command to get exact status (whether it is installed or not):
$ dpkg-query -W -f='${Status} ${Version}\n' apache-perl
Output:

install ok installed 1.3.34-2

Red Hat Enterprise / Fedora Linux / Suse Linux / Cent OS

Under Red Hat/Fedora Linux use rpm command:
$ rpm -qa | grep {package-name}
For example find out package mutt installed or not:
$ rpm -qa | grep mutt
Output:

mutt-1.4.1-10

If you don’t get any output ( package name along with version), it means package is not installed at all. You can display list all installed packages with the following command:
$ rpm -qa
$ rpm -qa | less

See also:

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. He has worked with global clients and in various industries, including IT, education, defense and space research, and the nonprofit sector. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+.

Share this on (or read 10 comments/add one below):

10 comment

  1. Hi to all,

    This is my first massage over here& i hope i will get full support.

    How to open usermap.cfg file on NetApp server?- As i have to check whether unix user login is mapped correctly with Windows login.

    As the main problem which few of the users are having is as below —

    They are NOT able to map from Windows any network
    drive (unix accounts) due to they have not access to their share drive.

    It ask me for login and password, BUT earliear it never asked me for my windows login and password . It’s been working till the end of the year 2006.

    Please suggest solutions—–

    Many thanks in Advance

    amar

    Reply Report comment

  5. how do i verify packages that are installed without using rpm, i mean recently i installed squid using make, make all, configure configure-install

    after this, how do I check this package is installed?

    Reply Report comment

    1. …this is not possible as installing “by hand” (make install) has nothing to do with a “package” nor package management.

      To find out if i.e. squid was installed just try to locate the squid binary by where, locate or find, even if you build and install software from sources by make.

      If you use a port management system from i.e. pkgsrc, getoo portage or even FreeBSD the port management counts each modified and installed file of a port to make it possible to see which file belongs to which port (package) or which are installed etc.

      this might be another story.

      Reply Report comment

  6. Thank you very much, I have another issue, I have Installed texlive but I still get an error message in my crm ” pdf latex not installed”, so do you know how check if any software is installed or not ? It’s different from packages, isn’t it ?

    Thank you

    Reply Report comment

  7. If you have a list of packages you want to query, it’s much easier to just list them instead of using grep:

    rpm -q automake libtool flex bison pkgconfig gcc-c++ boost-devel libevent-devel

    Reply Report comment

  8. Why such a complicated command for rpm-based systems? On my machine (Fedora 20), I can just run rpm -q ${package_name}, and it’s *much* faster since it doesn’t need to list every package on the system and then grep through it:

    [[email protected] tmp]$ rpm -q vala; echo $?
    vala-0.22.1-1.fc20.x86_64
    0
    [[email protected] tmp]$ rpm -q missing-package; echo $?
    package missing-package is not installed
    1

    Is this a new feature?

    Reply Report comment

  9. In Debian based distros like Ubuntu, you can find out if a package is installed with:

    apacheInstalled=$(dpkg -s apache2 | grep ‘Status: install ok installed’| wc -l)
    #change apache2 to the package you are checking for. returns 1 if installed, 0 otherwise.
    #script does not have to be running as root… but to change installed stuff… it would.

    Reply Report comment

Leave a Comment