On Debian, the package manager can tell the versions of the installed software.

Let's say we want to know the version of mbsync(1).

Quoting a comment by @matthewsnyder, this is a 3 step process:

• Figure out full path of the command
• Figure out what package owns it
• Figure out the version of the package

The 3 steps are shown below:

alx@debian:~$ which mbsync
/usr/bin/mbsync
alx@debian:~$ which mbsync | xargs dpkg -S
isync: /usr/bin/mbsync
alx@debian:~$ which mbsync | xargs dpkg -S | cut -f1 -d:
isync
alx@debian:~$ which mbsync | xargs dpkg -S | cut -f1 -d: | xargs dpkg -l
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version      Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=====================================
ii  isync          1.4.4-5+b1   amd64        IMAP and MailDir mailbox synchronizer

Let's explain the steps:

which mbsync tells the full path of the binary.

... | xargs dpkg -S (i.e., dpkg -S /usr/bin/mbsync) tells you the package that provides the file.

... | cut -f1 -d: extracts the package name alone.

... | xargs dpkg -l (i.e., dpkg -l isync) tells you the info about the isync package.

However, if you didn't install the program with the package manager, obviously this won't help.

Other package managers for other OSes will have similar features.

posted 6 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

5mo ago

alx‭

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