Search for packages, ranked by popularity

apt-popcon() { (echo \#rank; apt-cache search "$@" |awk '$1 !~ /^lib/ {print " "$1" "}') |grep -Ff- <(wget -qqO- http://popcon.debian.org/by_inst.gz |gunzip); }

This will take the packages matching a given `apt-cache search` query (a collection of AND'd words or regexps) and tell you how popular they are. This is particularly nice for those times you have to figure out which solution to use for e.g. a PDF reader or a VNC client. Substitute "ubuntu.com" for "debian.org" if you want this to use Ubuntu's data instead. Everything else will work perfectly.

Sample Output

$ apt-popcon pdf 'viewer|reader'
#rank name                inst  vote   old recent no-files (maintainer)
437  poppler-utils       66519 10611 46940  8953    15 (Loic Minier)
794  evince              49734 31780 11813  6129    12 (Debian Gnome Maintainers)
891  evince-common       46071     0     0     0 46071 (Debian Gnome Maintainers)
1768 texlive-base        21932 10747  9236  1927    22 (Debian Tex Maintainers)
2235 gir1.2-evince-3.0   14571  3403  4527  6640     1 (Debian Gnome Maintainers)
2366 texlive-latex-extra 13550  1690  8065  3792     3 (Debian Tex Maintainers)
2370 gnome-sushi         13512  1435  8648  3427     2 (Debian Gnome Maintainers)
2444 okular              12726  8158  3776   791     1 (Debian Qt/kde Maintainers)
2696 xpdf                10854  5399  5027   403    25 (Michael Gilbert)
3385 gv                   6570  3344  3083   141     2 (Bernhard R. Link)
4004 epdfview             4861  2606  1567   687     1 (Yves-alexis Perez)
4603 xpdf-reader          3491   249  1105    14  2123 (Michael Gilbert)
4615 calibre-bin          3479   934  1986   557     2 (Miriam Ruiz)
4653 calibre              3425   935  1959   531     0 (Miriam Ruiz)
5461 antiword             2396  1108  1225    62     1 (Olly Betts)
5685 mozplugger           2173  1513   631    29     0 (Alessio Treglia)

By: adamhotep

2012-09-08 00:29:31

apt awk echo grep wget Debian Ubuntu apt-cache

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