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Have you ever wanted all of the information about the software packages installed on your Linux system in one easy to access, easy to read place? This bash shell script is for you then, as it compiles an HTML report of all installed software on your system, sorted by software section name, and by package name. Download the Linux dpkg Software Report version 1.20 script. IMPORTANT NOTICE: Version 1.20 is now available, and finally has all of the bugs ironed out so that all output from the program in HTML markup is now correct according to the intended formatting implied by the textual representation of the data as output by dpkg. All four textual list delimiter characters [-,*,+,o] are now being correctly interpreted into ordered, and unordered list structures instead of just [-,*] as in earlier versions. Nested lists are now being detected, and correctly formatted as intended by the software package authors. IMPORTANT NOTICE: Date 1-30-2009 - I have made many improvements to the code which I have not incremented the version number for. Although the current available version remains at 1.19, if you have downloaded previous to the date of this notice you should re-download the .gz file, and re-install the dpkg Software Report script set. The list formatting routines are now working correctly which were not prior to this date. Version changes list for Linux dpkg Software Report. The web pages generated by this script are the result of querying the dpkg command, the installed files lists, and the configuration files lists. It also includes links to any index.html files within your /usr/share/doc/packagename folders. All of the email addresses in the dpkg output are converted to click able mailto links with the package name already filled in as the subject line, so you can contact the maintainer, or original maintainer of a package. All web links, and ftp links in the dpkg output are also converted to click able links, giving easy access to a package's home pages, or other associated web sites, such as mailing lists. There is also an alphabetical list of all not installed packages that exist on your system in the alphabetical listings section of the report. Links are also provided to a package's installed files list, and configuration files list if any exist for that package. The introduction page of the report includes a total count of all installed, and not installed packages on your system, and tells you how long it took to run. The Linux dpkg Software Report makes an excellent place to begin learning about your Linux system, and it's software, and provides you with the ability to quickly look up many details about the software installed on it. For a look at a sample report that I generated with this script, have a look at this Linux dpkg Software Report sample output. Note that in this sample version on the web, the links to the local installed files list, and configuration files list will not work. You need to be viewing the report as generated on your own system in order for those links to work. This script takes a long time to run, as you can see on the sample report's front page, it took 17 minutes to run, but when you consider that it took that long to format the information in HTML tags, and generate an alphabetical HTML index to both the software section names, and the package names on over 2,000 installed packages, it's not that slow actually. I note that the script runs quite a bit faster if my web browser, and other resource hungry applications are closed while it runs. The Linux dpkg Software Report consists of two script files, one LableList.conf file, and an image file for the background image of the report. The script files are LinuxdpkgSoftwareReport.sh, and WriteHTML.sh. To use the report scripts, unzip the folders in the archive file into your /home/$USERNAME/ folder structure. Then issue the following command in Terminal to install the script set. sudo /home/$USERNAME/.dpkgSoftwareReport/install.sh You will then be able to run the dpkg Software Report by issuing the command "LinuxdpkgSoftwareReport.sh" in Terminal with no path name necessary. By default the script set will put it's output files into the folder /home/$USERNAME/.dpkgSoftwareReport/ but you may change this by first creating a configuration file named /home/$USERNAME/.config/dpkgSoftwareReport/dpkgSoftwareReport.conf with a single line in it, which consists of the absolute pathname to the folder you wish to have the output files written to. Make sure you use a leading / mark, and no trailing / mark when you enter the path name in the configuration file. Then depending on how many packages you have installed on your Linux system you will get a report in a short, or longer time, loaded into your default web browser. This script set should work on any Linux distribution that uses dpkg to keep track of your software packages. It has been thoroughly tested on Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, and runs with no errors on that distribution. Download the Linux dpkg Software Report version 1.20 script. I am hereby releasing the Linux dpkg Software Report script set as open source software, modify it at your own risk. Help me keep writing code for others to use. Please consider making a donation of whatever you can afford if you use my scripts, even something as small as one dime would help a lot. Thanks. | |
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