Hi, let me follow up on my word. Here is example of shell script which checks dependency almost like the perl one in the package. (Not much testing yet but seems to work OK here.)
If you include this, you can remove dependency to PERL. Osamu
#!/bin/bash DEBUG=0 # dependency can not have space LIST="dpkg,pbuilder,bogus|ifupdown,aptitude,bogus2|bosudbogus,boguss" decho() { if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ] ; then echo "$1" fi } dependency () { l="" # split with , IFS="," for i in `echo "$1"`; do INSTALLED=0 unset IFS # split with | IFS="|" for j in `echo "$i"`; do unset IFS decho "checking status of \"$j\" package" if dpkg -s $j 2>/dev/null | grep -q -e "Status: install ok installed" ; then decho ". \"$j\" package is installed." INSTALLED=1 else decho "- \"$j\" package is NOT installed." fi done if [ $INSTALLED -eq 0 ]; then if [ -z "$l" ]; then l=$i else l="$l,$i" fi fi done echo "$l" } dependency "$LIST"