Small trick with aptitude, package manager in Debian-based distributions.
Aptitude’s search understands some templates in search. Several of them:
~ntext — all packages with name containing text
~dtext — with description containing text
~i — installed packages
~c — removed (not purged) packages
~N — new packages in repository
~U — upgradable packages
~Dtext — packages depend of packages text
~Rtext — packages that depend of text
| — OR
! — NOT
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Case studies:
aptitude purge ‘~c’ — purge all removed packages
aptitude search ~neclipse — search all packagse with name containing eclipse
aptitude search ‘~i(~nfirefox|~niseweasel) ‘ –all installed packages with ‘firefox’ or ‘isewease’ in package name
aptitude search ‘!~i~dkde’ — not installed packages with ‘kde’ in description
