Package: apt Version: 1.8.2 Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainer,
*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate *** I wanted to check whether or not updates are available from my script written in bash. I found that aptitude can tell the number of packages which are available for upgrade using aptitude search '~U' | wc -l But for apt there is no reliable way to do the same, it outputs a warning that its output is not meant to be parsed by scripts. Please provide a commandline utility that tells '0' if no updates are available, and '1' if some updates are available. I would not mind having the same functionality available in C, but I found no mention of it on the https://wiki.debian.org/Apt page. *** End of the template - remove these template lines *** -- Package-specific info: -- (no /etc/apt/preferences present) -- -- (no /etc/apt/preferences.d/* present) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-6.x.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-6.x.list~ present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/jitsi-stable.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrix-org.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrix-org.list~ present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/parsoid.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/parsoid.list~ present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ring-nightly-main.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ring-nightly-main.list~ present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/skype-stable.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/webmin.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/x2go.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list present, but not submitted) -- -- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list~ present, but not submitted) -- -- System Information: Debian Release: 10.0 APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN Locale: LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=ru_RU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=ru_RU:ru (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages apt depends on: ii adduser 3.118 ii debian-archive-keyring 2019.1 ii gpgv 2.2.12-1 ii libapt-pkg5.0 1.8.2 ii libc6 2.28-10 ii libgcc1 1:8.3.0-6 ii libgnutls30 3.6.7-4 ii libseccomp2 2.3.3-4 ii libstdc++6 8.3.0-6 Versions of packages apt recommends: ii ca-certificates 20190110 Versions of packages apt suggests: pn apt-doc <none> ii aptitude 0.8.11-7 ii dpkg-dev 1.19.7 ii gnupg 2.2.12-1 ii gnupg2 2.2.12-1 ii powermgmt-base 1.34 ii synaptic 0.84.6 -- no debconf information