title: How do I find out what version of a bower package is actually installed?
body: <p>Normally a <code>bower.json</code> file specifies some dependencies, but these are typically expressed so that they allow a range of versions of a bower package to be used (e.g. <code>&gt;=1.0</code>, which means anything higher than version 1.0).</p>
  
  <p>I have an automated process which needs to find what version of a bower package is <em>actually installed</em> on this system right now.</p>
  
  <p>How can I find this out programmatically (just the version itself), ideally using standard Unix command line tools / the bower command?</p>
  
  <p><code>bower info &lt;thepackagename&gt;</code> does <em>not</em> show this - it shows information about what is currently available from the bower repository (for example, even if I do <code>bower info apackageIdonthaveinstalled</code> it will still show a valid JSON structure containing a version number).</p>
  
  <p><code>cat bower_components/thepackagename/bower.json | node_modules/json/lib/json.js version</code> works for some packages (assuming the npm package <code>json</code> is installed), but not all (e.g. jquery 2.2.0's bower package does not contain a bower.json).</p>