Debian: Listing all user-installed packages?

Question

For a cyber security competition I participate in, I\'m given a Debian virtual machine with many packages installed and asked to clean extraneous or malicious packages.

Answer 1

Below is a line from a "health" script I run on my desktop every night. Besides gathering information from sensors, network usage, HDD temperature, etc. it also gets a list of all the software I've installed manually from the command line.

I'm running Kubuntu 14.04.5 (Trusty) at the moment and I don't know the details of any differences between Ubuntu and Debian's package management but hopefully this will work for you as well as it does for me.

( zcat $( ls -tr /var/log/apt/history.log*.gz ) ; cat /var/log/apt/history.log ) | egrep '^(Start-Date:|Commandline:)' | grep -v aptdaemon | egrep '^Commandline:' | egrep 'install' 1>>installed_packages.txt