I am trying to get license information of uninstalled deb packages.
dpkg --info <package-name>.deb
does not give that information.
Is there any command in ubuntu which will give this info?
(In rpm world rpm -qpi gives that info)
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147answers:
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A:
There's no simple command that I know of. You can do something like this:
dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile foo.deb |tar -xvO ./usr/share/doc/foo/copyright
This prints the file to standard output.
Edit Hmm, that sounds hard. After a quick perusal of the apt cache on my Debian system, I found some phrases that might be useful:
- "GNU General Public License"
- "the above copyright notice and this permission notice", making sure you unwrap lines first
"
/usr/share/common-licenses/*
"This seems to be the closest to a standard license you'll get, but be careful since often the packaging is under a common-license, but the package contents are under a separate license.
^License: MPL-1.1 | GPL-2+ | Apache-2.0
However, some packages (ImageMagick) simply have a free-form license in the copyright file that doesn't really conform to any stock license, except that someone considered it DFSG-approved.
jleedev
2009-12-10 23:16:11
the copyright file does not have a standard format (i.e license name, license text) which makes it hard to extract that info. Specially if I want to do this for hundreds of packages.
aj
2009-12-10 23:38:32
Hmmm..I guess a foolproof solution does not exist then.
aj
2009-12-11 02:16:55