[TIP] Determine the format of the applications you have installed

1

I met a forum member who was confused by the different formats of Linux applications.
He would have liked something that could determine whether a given application had been installed in .deb, Flatpak or Snap format, so that he would know how to uninstall it.

Rather than going through ‘Software’, I preferred to have fun creating an alias.


  • Open the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and enter the following line (copy and paste) to edit or create the alias file:
gedit .bash_aliases
  • Then copy and paste this second line at the end of the file that has just opened:
alias wp='_wp() { echo "APT"; apt list --installed "$1" ; echo && echo "FLATPAK"; flatpak list --app | grep -wi "$1"; echo && echo "SNAP"; snap list | grep -wi "$1"; }; _wp'
  • Save the changes, then close the editor and the terminal.

Open a new terminal and type ‘wp’ (as in ‘Which Package’), followed by all or part of the application name:

wp brave*
APT
Listing... Done
brave-browser/stable,now 1.84.132 amd64 [installed]
brave-keyring/stable,now 1.19 all [installed, automatic]

FLATPAK

SNAP
error: no matching Snap package installed


wp foliate
APT
Listing... Done

FLATPAK
Foliate    com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate    3.3.0    stable    system

SNAP
error: no matching Snap package installed


wp ubuntu-budgie-welcome
APT
Listing... Done

FLATPAK

SNAP
Name                    Version  Revision  Tracking          Publisher       Notes
ubuntu-budgie-welcome  0.26.0   564       latest/stable  ubuntubudgie  classic

Note

  • Accepts lowercase as well as uppercase input.
  • Flatpak doesn’t accept the wildcard ‘*’.
  • APT and Flatpak return nothing, and Snap reports an error if there are no applications in these formats.

Hoping this helps.

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