Check if an apt-get package is installed and then install it if it's not on Linux

To check if packagename was installed, type:

dpkg -s <packagename>

You can also use dpkg-query that has a neater output for your purpose, and accepts wild cards, too.

dpkg-query -l <packagename>

To find what package owns the command, try:

dpkg -S `which <command>`

For further details, see article Find out if package is installed in Linux and dpkg cheat sheet.

To be a little more explicit, here's a bit of bash script that checks for a package and installs it if required. Of course, you can do other things upon finding that the package is missing, such as simply exiting with an error code.

REQUIRED_PKG="some-package"
PKG_OK=$(dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Status}\n' $REQUIRED_PKG|grep "install ok installed")
echo Checking for $REQUIRED_PKG: $PKG_OK
if [ "" = "$PKG_OK" ]; then
  echo "No $REQUIRED_PKG. Setting up $REQUIRED_PKG."
  sudo apt-get --yes install $REQUIRED_PKG 
fi

If the script runs within a GUI (e.g. it is a Nautilus script), you'll probably want to replace the 'sudo' invocation with a 'gksudo' one.

This one-liner returns 1 (installed) or 0 (not installed) for the 'nano' package..

$(dpkg-query -W -f='${Status}' nano 2>/dev/null | grep -c "ok installed")

even if the package does not exist / is not available.

The example below installs the 'nano' package if it is not installed..

if [ $(dpkg-query -W -f='${Status}' nano 2>/dev/null | grep -c "ok installed") -eq 0 ];
then
  apt-get install nano;
fi