Play with awk The packages updates are logged in /var/log/messages and using awk it's easy to achieve some kind of report. awk -F '-' '/Added/ && /->/ { sub(">","",$0) ; if( $(NF-1) != $NF ) { $NF=" => "$NF ; print } }' /var/log/messages Limitations: The command seems to mangle the separators when displaying the result and doesn't work well w ith flavors packages that will always be shown as updated. Dev1ls