Linux Package Management: Keeping Up with the Times Red Hat Package Manager Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Monday, April 22, 2002 10:11:13 AM
RPM is the Swiss army knife of the package manager world, in that you use
a single command to do a wide variety of things. Well, that's not entirely
true: you use a single command, with a whole pile of possible option
flags.
At the base of working with RPM files is the rpm command. Some common
variations you'll see of using this one include:
Command Example
Description
rpm -qa | more
List all installed RPM packages, and of
course display them only one screen at a time, there's a lot of them on an
RPM-based system!
rpm -ql perl
List all of the files added to the
filesystem when I installed the Perl package, and where they were placed.
rpm -qlp perl-5.6.1.i386.rpm
List all of the files and where they will
be added to the filesystem if I install the Perl package specified.
rpm -qi perl
Display information about the Perl
package I installed.
rpm -qip perl-5.6.1.i386.rpm
Display information about the Perl package
I'm thinking about installing.
rpm -ivh perl-5.6.1.i386.rpm
Install this Perl package, give verbose
output, and display hashes to show me progress.
rpm -Uvh perl-5.6.1.i386.rpm
Install this Perl package, or if it's
already installed but a previous version, update my Perl installation with
the new version. Also, give verbose output, and display hashes to show me
progress.
rpm -Fvh perl-5.6.1.i386.rpm
Install this Perl package even if I'm
getting errors about conflicts or versions. Also, give verbose output, and
display hashes to show me progress.
rpm -e perl
Uninstall the Perl package.
In the old days, it was smart to only install or update one package at a
time, since if RPM ran into conflicts trying to install a long list in
order, the entire installation or update would fail--this is what caught
me up in the KDE installation. Nowadays, the rpm command is a much smarter
tool and can figure out the proper order if all of the necessary packages
are listed. Even better, if you want to install every RPM in the current
directory, just use:
rpm -Uvh *
Popular distributions that utilize RPM are Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE.
I'm sure I've left someone's favorite out, my apologies in advance. Each
of these distributions has at least one tool available that helps you to
grab all of the latest security patches, bug fixes, and more for what
you've got installed on your system.
