How to find out if a package is installed in Ubuntu

To find out if a particular package is already installed in Ubuntu, we can use the dpkg package manager.

dpkg -l package-name

Change package-name to the name of your package. For example, if you want to check if the nano editor is installed.

dpkg -l nano

If the package nano is installed, the result should be:

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  nano                       2.5.3-2ubuntu1     amd64              small, friendly text editor inspired by Pico

If the package is not installed, the result will be:

dpkg-query: no packages found matching nano

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