listing packages by priority

Yes, aptitude can list packages by priority, but what I wanted was a simple list of just package names. I've got two ways of getting a bare list:

Updated with many thanks to Phil Hands.

$ aptitude search '~prequired'|sed -ne 's/^i [ A] \([^ ]*\).*$/\1/p' | tr '\n' ' ' | sort -u|fold -s ; echo

#!/bin/sh
# Licence: GPL-3+
FILE=`find /var/lib/apt/lists/ -name '*unstable*Packages'`
LIST=`grep-dctrl -n -s Priority '' $FILE |sort -u`

for P in $LIST; do
  [ "optional" != "$P" -a "extra" != "$P" ] || continue
  echo "Priority: $P"
  grep-dctrl -n -s Package,Priority "$P" $FILE | sed -ne '/^'$P'$/!h;/^'$P'$/{g;p}' | tr '\n' ' ' | fold -s
  echo
done

The advantage with the script is that is lists all packages in all priorities except optional and extra and can be restricted to individual Packages files and therefore to individual repositories and components. (Change the find expression if you have more than one repository specifying unstable or adapt the script to accept a path to the relevant Packages file on the command line.)

I really ought to have used perl because pattern matching in perl is a
lot more natural to me than using sed or awk. I do tend to chain a
couple of sed commands, just so that it's easier to work out which bit
is broken when it breaks.

The final version of this script will end up in emdebian-grip-server,
converted to perl with POD content, translated and reading the Packages
files using Debian::Packages::Compare.

$ ~/scripts/list-priority
Priority: important
adduser apt-utils apt aptitude bsdmainutils libbz2-1.0 cpio cron libcwidget3
debian-archive-keyring dhcp3-client dhcp3-common dmidecode ed libgdbm3 gnupg
gpgv groff-base ifupdown iproute iptables iputils-ping logrotate libept0
libsigc++-2.0-0c2a libtasn1-3 libusb-0.1-4 man-db manpages module-init-tools
nano libncursesw5 net-tools netbase netcat-traditional libnewt0.52 whiptail
libssl0.9.8 libpopt0 libreadline5 libreadline6 readline-common rsyslog
tasksel-data tasksel libwrap0 info install-info traceroute udev vim-common
vim-tiny wget libxapian15
Priority: required
libacl1 libattr1 base-files base-passwd bash coreutils debconf-i18n debconf
debianutils diffutils dpkg e2fslibs e2fsprogs libcomerr2 libss2 libc-bin libc6
findutils gcc-4.3-base gcc-4.4-base libgcc1 libstdc++6 grep gzip hostname
lsb-base libdevmapper1.02.1 lzma liblocale-gettext-perl libselinux1 libsepol1
libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl libtext-wrapi18n-perl libunwind7 mawk
libncurses5 ncurses-base ncurses-bin libpam-modules libpam-runtime libpam0g
perl-base procps sed sensible-utils login passwd libslang2 initscripts sysv-rc
sysvinit-utils sysvinit tar tzdata bsdutils libblkid1 libuuid1 mount util-linux
zlib1g
Priority: standard
apt-listchanges at bash-completion bc dc bind9-host dnsutils libbind9-50
libdns53 libisc50 liblwres50 bsd-mailx libsasl2-2 libdb4.8 libdb4.5 libdb4.6
libdb4.7 debian-faq doc-debian doc-linux-text libc6-i386 locales exim4-base
exim4-config exim4-daemon-light exim4 file libmagic1 gettext-base libgnutls26
libgpm2 libkeyutils1 libgssapi-krb5-2 libgssrpc4 libk5crypto3 libkadm5clnt6
libkadm5srv6 libkdb5-4 libkrb5-3 libkrb5support0 less lsof libcap2 libedit2
libevent-1.4-2 libgc1c2 libgcrypt11 libgpg-error0 libgssglue1 libidn11
liblockfile1 libnfsidmap2 librpcsecgss3 libunwind7-dev libxml2 m4 mime-support
mlocate mutt ncurses-term ftp telnet nfs-common libldap-2.4-2 openssh-client
patch libpci3 pciutils libpcre3 perl-modules perl portmap procmail
python-central python-minimal python python2.5-minimal python2.5
python-reportbug reportbug wamerican libsqlite3-0 tcpd texinfo time ucf w3m
whois

Hmm, next step is to check the "Priority: standard" set for Emdebian - it looks far too large for what would be standard on an embedded device. LDAP will be dropped for one - and what is a -dev package doing in there? libunwind7-dev isn't even installed on my amd64 Debian desktop!

Probably check the important and required listings too, then tweak what we need to change via the archive overrides for Emdebian Grip.

Come to think of it, I might need a PHP version of this to read live data from the repository, documenting the changes.