pkg prime-list

[balanga]

I just read that:-

pkg prime-list is an alias command declared in /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf. There are many others that can be used to query the package database of the system. For instance, command pkg prime-origins can be used to get the origin port directory of the list mentioned above:

I guess which explains why it sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.
In my copy of /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf among the list of ALIASes it appears as:-

prime-list: "query -e '%a = 0' '%n'",

although I'm not sure what installs this file.. guess it must be pkg()...

 

[SirDice]

Yep, it gets installed with ports-mgmt/pkg. But as with all configuration files, if it already exists then it won't be overwritten. So you may have had an older version of pkg.conf that didn't have these aliases.