Where can I look up my update history?

Question

Is there a place where I can look what updates I've installed?

Answer 1

You can read the history.log file in /var/log/apt.

Eg. less /var/log/apt/history.log.

Answer 2

In 10.10, Ubuntu Software Center has a list of all the updates you have downloaded in the past.

Answer 3

/var/log/apt contains a history of package installations. However, by default, it is managed by logrotate which compresses and ages out old entries.

Answer 4

As an alternative to lgarzo's answer, you can grep what you are interested in from /var/log/dpkg.log. E.g., if you want to see everything you installed or upgraded yesterday, you could run:

cat /var/log/dpkg.log | grep "^2012-03-25.*\ installed\ "

One thing to note: this will also list manually installed packages (sudo dpkg -i ...), which won't show up in apt's history.

Even better use zgrep if it's installed so you can find lines in gzipped files as well

zgrep "^2012-03-25.*\ installed\ " /var/log/dpkg.log*

Answer 5

On 10.04 Click (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager > File > History)

Answer 6

It's now possible to do this through the software center as well! Go to History and you can display all of your updates and installations.

Answer 7

It became useful for us to have a slightly more easy and accurate answer to the question "when was the last time we patched this thing?". So I put this together. I tested it on 12.04 and 14.04 and 16.04. It returns reasonably accurate answers for that question. Note: "reasonably accurate" probably isn't "completely accurate". Note: "for that question" only.

sample output:

xenial% 9: ./linuxpatchdate 
2016-07-19 54
2017-02-24 363
2017-03-08 7
2017-03-09 2

subroutines and program:

#!/usr/bin/perl

#------------------ subroutines --------------------

sub parseRecord {
    my $sdate = "";
    my $useful = 0;
    my $packages = 0;
    my @ptmp;
    while (my $recordLine = shift() ) {

       if ($recordLine =~ m/^Start-Date: ([\d\-]*).*/) {
          $sdate = $1;
       }
       elsif ($recordLine =~ m/^Commandline:.*upgrade/) {
          $useful = 1;
       }
       elsif ($recordLine =~ m/^Install: (.*)/) {
          $recordLine =~ s/\([^\)]*\)//g;
          @ptmp = split(/,/,$recordLine);
          $packages = $packages + $#ptmp + 1;
       }
       elsif ($recordLine =~ m/^Upgrade: (.*)/) {
          $recordLine =~ s/\([^\)]*\)//g;
          @ptmp = split(/,/,$recordLine);
          $packages = $packages + $#ptmp + 1;
       }
    }



    if ($useful) {
       return ($sdate,$packages);
    }
    else {
       return ("0",0);
    }
}


#------------------ main program --------------------

@lines = split(/\n/,`/bin/zcat -f /var/log/apt/history.log  /var/log/apt/history*gz`);
my %patchHash;
my $line;
my @inputLines;
my $pushDate = "";
my $pushNum = "";

foreach $line (@lines) {
    # all records separated by blank lines
    if ($line !~ /./) {
       # no-op
    }
    elsif ($line =~ m/^Start-Date: ([\d\-]*).*/) {
       @inputLines = ();
       push (@inputLines, $line);
    }
    elsif ($line =~ m/^End-Date: ([\d\-]*).*/) {
       ($pushDate, $pushNum) = parseRecord(@inputLines);
       if ($pushNum != 0) {
          $patchHash{$pushDate} += $pushNum;
       }
    }
    else {
       push (@inputLines, $line);
    }
}

foreach $pushDate (sort(keys(%patchHash))) {
   print "$pushDate $patchHash{$pushDate}\n";
}