Explore the APT history
sudo npm -g i https://github.com/rolfen/apt-history.git
Or, alternatively:
git clone https://github.com/rolfen/apt-history.git
sudo npm -g i ./apt-history
To uninstall:
sudo npm -g r apt-history
apt-history
By default, it reads last 10 "entries"/"operations" (this number can be changed with --limit) and list commands.
The entries are numbered following their sequence in the APT log, zero based.
The latest one is at the bottom.
To read 5 entries starting from #40 one in history.log
apt-history --from 40 --limit 5
You can also list packages removed packages, for example
apt-history Remove
Examine operation #4 in the history log
apt-history 4
Get property "Purge" of the operation
This would be the list of packages purged by the command
apt-history 4 Purge
Get packages installed during this operation. --as-apt-argument returns a space-separated list of package names.
apt-history 4 Install --as-apt-arguments
By default, apt-history looks for the APT log at /var/log/apt/history.log.
-s or --stdin allows you to pipe the APT log instead.
cat /var/log/apt/history.log |apt-history -s
You can also specify the location of the log file
apt-history --input /var/log/apt/history.log
The following will attempt to uninstall all packages installed by command #4 (including installed suggested and recommended packages)
sudo dpkg -r `apt-history 4 Install --as-apt-arguments`
Here we use dpkg -r instead of apt-get remove. That is because apt-get remove will automatically remove any dependant package. For example is you do apt-get remove evolution it will automatically remove the whole Gnome desktop package because it depends on evolution.
dpkg will not do such a thing. Faced with this same problem, dpkg will just fail instead of automatically uninstalling dependant packages. In the case where it fails, you can add --force-depends to the dpkg command to tell it to ignore dependency problems.
Ignoring dependency problems with --force-depends can create broken packages (it will print a warning to tell you), in which case you should run apt-get --fix-broken install afterwards.
You can also extract useful information using piping and standards shell tools. For example:
cat /var/log/apt/history.log| grep Commandline|nl -v 0|tail
is similar to:
apt-history
I have noticed that the output format of apt-cache show and of cat /var/log/apt/history.log are similar, maybe we can reuse code to parsing code.