Checking for installed programs on your Raspberry Pi is easy with the dpkg command.

interactive high-level object-oriented language (default python3 version) …


Updated August 30, 2023

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interactive high-level object-oriented language (default python3 version)

  1. Open a terminal window on your Raspberry Pi by clicking on the terminal icon in the menu bar or by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T.
  2. Type the following command into the terminal and replace <program_name> with the name of the program you want to check:
dpkg -s <program_name>

For example, if you wanted to check if the Python programming language was installed on your Raspberry Pi, you would type:

dpkg -s python3
  1. Press Enter to run the command. If the program is installed, you will see output similar to this:
Package: python3
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: interpreters
Installed-Size: 20847
Maintainer: Python Packaging Team <team@tracker.python.org>
Architecture: armhf
Multi-Arch: allowed
Source: python3-defaults
Version: 3.7.3-1+rpi1
Depends: python3.7 (>= 3.7.3-1+rpi1), libpython3.7-stdlib (= 3.7.3-1+rpi1), python3.7-minimal (= 3.7.3-1+rpi1), libexpat1 (>= 2.0.1), libmpdec2 (>= 2.4.2), libreadline8 (>= 6.0), libsqlite3-0 (>= 3.7.17), zlib1g (>= 1:1.2.8.dfsg-2), libncursesw6 (>= 6), libtinfo6 (>= 6), libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.9.14), libsqlite3-0 (>= 3.7.17), libssl1.1 (>= 1.1.0), libgdbm6 (>= 1.8.3), liblzma5 (>= 5.2.3), libffi6 (>= 3.2.1), zlib1g (>= 1:1.2.8.dfsg-2), libexpat1 (>= 2.0.1)
 Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It
 includes an extensive standard library with many modules for different areas such as
 web services, GUIs, system administration and scientific calculations.
 .
 This package provides the interpreter, compiler and shared libraries for Python 3.
Homepage: https://www.python.org/
Original-Maintainer: Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org>

The Status line will say “install ok installed” if the program is installed, or it will give an error message if the program is not found.

If you need to install a program that is not already on your Raspberry Pi, you can use the apt-get command. For example, to install Python, you would type:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python3

This will check for updates to the package list and then install Python 3 if it is not already installed on your Raspberry Pi.