I know that I can get a list of installed packages without their version 
numbers with eix:

# eix -nI --format '<category>/<name>' | \
	grep -vr '^$\|^\[[0-9]*\]\|^Found\ [0-9]*'

This is probably possible with esearch too. But does anybody know of a way to 
get it with portage, bash or gentoolkit?

I was of course considering something like this:

# cd /var/db/pkg && ls * | ${some_magic_regular_expression_to_remove_version}

But I have found it impossible to make a regular expression that does break 
for at least one of those:

media-fonts/font-adobe-100dpi-1.0.0
media-fonts/font-adobe-75dpi-1.0.0
media-fonts/font-adobe-utopia-type1-1.0.1
media-libs/jpeg-6b-r7
net-misc/cisco-vpnclient-3des-4.8.00.0490
sys-apps/portage-2.1.1_pre1-r2
sys-fs/udev-090
sys-fs/udev-090-r1
sys-libs/libstdc++-v3-3.3.6
sys-libs/timezone-data-2006g

Which are:

media-fonts/font-adobe-100dpi
media-fonts/font-adobe-75dpi
media-fonts/font-adobe-utopia-type1
media-libs/jpeg
net-misc/cisco-vpnclient-3des
sys-apps/portage
sys-fs/udev
sys-fs/udev
sys-libs/libstdc++-v3
sys-libs/timezone-data

Any ideas?

-- 
Bo Andresen