I have sid running on a machine and listbugs warned of a couple issues in a recent update.. one of which would break aptitude if I let it go through.

I used "aptitude hold <packagename>" to block those packages from upgrading at this time.

My actual question is, is there a simple command to show all packages that have been held ? if there is I haven't found it.

aptitude search ~i will show all installed packages

I was thinking there might be something similar to show held packages.

in the mean time I'm doing aptitude search ~i | grep ih which did locate my held packages (and a couple others) I was just curious if there was a cleaner method that I am not aware of.

Thanks for your consideration.

Try with: aptitude search ~i|grep ^ih

Or just use aptitude itself: The search patterns available on the command line are extremely powerful.

That's exactly what I was looking for. I knew it was probably out there but I was missing it somewhere along the line.

OK, I now see the link from the "Using Aptitude from the command line" section to the "Search Patterns" section.. I'll mark this one up to selective blindness/stupidity.(you make the call)

Thanks much !!