I came across this page again, seems they took my advice to heart on the one line command to grep out a list of all installed packages on a Debian or Ubuntu system. This creates a file that you can use as a DR (disaster recovery) map of all installed apps — you only need to install your base system, and then use this file to reinstall all of your apps. Their earlier versions didn’t produce a clean list and it certiainly didn’t go the extra mile of emailing a copy to you.

dpkg -–get-selections | grep -v deinstall > ubuntu-files; cat ubuntu-files

| mailx -s “ubuntu-files” [email protected]