Do you know how to find out what version of SSH is running on your Ubuntu box? How about what version of apt? Would you like to see what certain packages depend on to run? Or find the MD5 hash for already installed packages?

There’s one easy command you can type to get you this info, and more.

Let’s say you have SSH installed and you want to know all about it. Type:

sudo apt-cache showpkg ssh | less

You should see a whole bunch of info, starting with the version of SSH you’re currently running and ending with dependancies.