Thursday, August 24, 2006

rpm options

Hello EB,

rpm is a powerful Package Manager, which can be used to build, install, query, verify, update, and erase individual software packages. A package consists of an archive of files and meta-data used to install and erase the archive files. The meta-data includes helper scripts, file attributes, and descriptive information about the package. Packages come in two varieties: binary packages, used to encapsulate software to be installed, and source packages, containing the source code and recipe necessary to produce binary packages.

Now most of famous distribution used rpm packages like redhat, suse and even lot free distributions like white box.

Following are some but basic option for rpm command -

rpm {-i--install} [install-options] PACKAGE_FILE ...
rpm {-U--upgrade} [install-options] PACKAGE_FILE ...

  • Sometimes you want to know which library uses which rpm packages or vice versa one rpm packages installs which libraries

#rpm -qf /usr/lib/libstdc++-2-libc6.1-1-2.9.0.so
compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.128

#rpm -ql compat-libstdc++-296-2.96-132.7.2
/usr/lib/libstdc++-2-libc6.1-1-2.9.0.so
/usr/lib/libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so
/usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3

  • Most of time you want to uninstall some rpm packages and you use rpm -e but it says there multiple packages are exist use

rpm -e --allmatches {rpm name}

Let me know if you have any queries with rpm commands,

hope these information will help you.

Thanks