package installation log on Ubuntu (dpkg, apt-get, aptitude)

Dpkg log

All deb package operations must go through deb system. So no matter you use apt-get install or deb -I, it will be logged in /var/log/dpkg.log.

lesspipe can show content of .gz files directly. But it cannot show normal text file .

Show install and upgrade history for dkg.log.#.gz files:

ls /var/log/dpkg.log*|sort -r|xargs -I{} lesspipe {}|egrep "^[0-9\-]+[[:space:]][0-9:]+[[:space:]](install|upgrade)[[:space:]]"

Show install and upgrade history for dkg.log and dpkg.log.# files:

ls /var/log/dpkg.log*|sort -r|grep -v ".gz"|xargs -I{} cat {}|egrep "^[0-9\-]+[[:space:]][0-9:]+[[:space:]](install|upgrade)[[:space:]]"

apt-get log

apt-get logges to /var/log/apt/term.log

aptitude

/var/log/aptitude

Resources

http://superuser.com/questions/6338/how-do-you-track-which-packages-were-installed-on-ubuntu-linux

As far as logs, apt-get notoriously doesn't have one;
dpkg does (at /var/log/dpkg.log) but it's famously hard to parse and can only be read with root privileges;
aptitude has one at /var/log/aptitude and you can page through it with regular user privileges.