If you don't want the versions, as Duncan wrote, I would suggest that
you use eix.  eix -I will provide a pretty-printed list of all the
packages installed on your system.  Read its man page to find out how to
do custom formatting.  You can have it print just the package name, the
category and package names, versions, use flags, etc.  Once you get a
feel for its syntax, you shouldn't have any trouble getting the
information you need.

Be careful, though, to run update-eix before doing anything because eix
uses an index database, not the actual portage tree or data.  If you
make any changes to your system, eix will not know it until you run
update-eix.

Dustin C. Hatch
http://www.dchweb.com



Duncan wrote:
> "Mark Haney" <mhaney@ercbroadband.org> posted
> 462E2157.5050606@ercbroadband.org, excerpted below, on  Tue, 24 Apr 2007
> 11:25:11 -0400:
>
>   
>> A while back, someone posted a command that I think pulled all the info
>> from 'emerge -eav world' into a nice neat package so that a GCC upgrade
>> can be done in smaller increments.  Now, however, I can't seem to find
>> it in the archives, or in my stored list backup.  Can someone throw me a
>> copy of that post or point me to the right one online?
>>     
>
> emerge -pe world|grep /|cut -f2 -d"]"|sed "s/^ /=/"
>
> That'll give you a list of packages, with the versions, preceded by "=" 
> for each one, so emerge will give you exactly the same versions.  You can 
> redirect it to a file as necessary.
>
> If you want it without versions, so as to emerge the latest, it gets 
> somewhat hairier, because the version strings are somewhat difficult to 
> automatically delete without error.  I usually just take the lazy way 
> out, replacing that sed above with another cut, as so:
>
> emerge -pe world|grep /|cut -f2 -d"]"|cut -f2 -d" "
>
> That still leaves the versions.  Then I open the redirect file in my 
> favorite editor and use search and replace with prompt, playing with the 
> search pattern and repeating until I get what I want.  A regex pattern of 
> -[-abcr.0-9]*$, replaced with <nothing> gets most of it, but leaves 
> strings such as -alpha and -beta, which are easy enough to remove on 
> either further searches or manually.  Of course, it's possible to include 
> those in the regex search pattern as well, and would be possible to then 
> make that a sed command, but it's difficult to get exactly right, then 
> remember, and easy enough to do in a decent editor, so that's what I do.
>
>