See What Version Of A Package Is Installed On Ubuntu

The apt-get utilities are simply a front-end to the debian dpkg utility, which actually does the real work. You can use this utility to figure out what version is installed.

Here’s an example, where I was trying to figure out what version of Ruby I had installed on my system:

You can see that I’ve got version 1.8.4 installed.

Package: ruby1.8Status: install ok installedPriority: optionalSection: interpretersInstalled-Size: 272Maintainer: Ubuntu Core Developers ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.comArchitecture: i386Version: 1.8.4-5ubuntu1.2Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4-1), libruby1.8 (>= 1.8.4)Suggests: ruby1.8-examples, rdoc1.8, ri1.8Description: Interpreter of object-oriented scripting language Ruby 1.8Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easyobject-oriented programming. It has many features to process textfiles and to do system management tasks (as in perl). It is simple,straight-forward, and extensible..This package provides version 1.8 series of Ruby..On Debian, Ruby 1.8 is provided as separate packages. You can getfull Ruby 1.8 distribution by installing following packages..ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8 ruby1.8-elispruby1.8-examples libdbm-ruby1.8 libgdbm-ruby1.8 libtcltk-ruby1.8libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8Original-Maintainer: akira yamada akira@debian.org