7.2.4 Querying

 

Querying the database of installed packages is accomplished with rpm -q. A simple use is rpm -q foo which will print the package name, version, and release number of the installed package foo:

$ rpm -q foo
rpm-2.0-1

Instead of specifying the package name, you can use the following options with -q to specify what package(s) you want to query. These are called Package Specification Options.

• -a queries all currently installed packages.
• -f <file> will query the package owning <file>.
• -F is the same as -f except it takes filenames via stdin (e.g. find /usr/bin | rpm -qF).
• -p <packagefile> queries the package <packagefile>.
• -P is like -p except it takes package filenames from stdin (e.g. find /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS | rpm -qP).

There are a number of ways to specify what information to display about queried packages. The following options are used to select the information you are interested in. These are called Information Selection Options.

• -i displays package information such as name, description, release, size, build date, install date, vendor, and other miscellaneous information.
• -l displays the list of files that the package ``owns''.
• -s displays the state of all the files in the package. There are only two possible states, normal and missing.
• -d displays a list of files marked as documentation (man pages, info pages, README's, etc).
• -c displays a list of files marked as configuration files. These are the files you change after installation to adapt the package to your system (sendmail.cf, passwd, inittab, etc).

For those options that display file lists, you can add -v to your command line to get the lists in a familiar ls -l format.