CODEWITHSUNDEEP
centos
Yagami
Yagami

Reputation: 11

Listing installed packages with yum and rpm mismatch

How can I efficiently list installed and available packages on Cent OS?

I have already tried yum list installed, which is supposed to output the list of all installed while rpm -qa produces a different result in size.

Which one should I trust? Or am I omitting something?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1136

Answers (2)

Franklin Piat
Franklin Piat

Reputation: 4561

My understanding is: rpm -qa is better to know what is installed (RPM packages, right! ). Whereas yum is better to know what could be installed and find required dependencies. It is usually fine to use yum for both purposes.

I tested on a CentOS 7 system. They have almost identical list, except that rpm also reports some gpg-pubkey pseudo packages (try rpm -qa gpg-pubkey\*).

If you want to compare the lists on your system, first get the rpm's list:

$ rpm -q -a --qf '%{NAME}\t%{ARCH}\t%{VERSION}\t%{RELEASE}\n' | sort > /tmp/rpm-qa.lst

Then extract YUM's list (using repoquery which is part of package yum-utils:

$ repoquery -q -a --installed  --qf '%{NAME}\t%{ARCH}\t%{VERSION}\t%{RELEASE}' | sort > /tmp/repo-qa.lst

Then compare:

$ diff -u0 /tmp/rpm-qa.lst /tmp/repo-qa.lst
--- /tmp/rpm-qa.lst     2015-03-08 16:07:38.297325253 +0100
+++ /tmp/repo-qa.lst    2015-03-08 16:07:43.281438369 +0100
@@ -143,1 +142,0 @@
-gpg-pubkey     (none)  352c64e5        52ae6884

(See also question https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/190203/16640)

Upvotes: 2

mathew
mathew

Reputation: 31

Both commands works in the same way only difference is 'yum list installed' output maybe bigger than 'rpm -qa' because yum will show package dependencies also in its output.

While installing a package using rpm, we need to manually install the dependencies whereas yum will do that automatically. So in this case if you want to list the packages only use, 'rpm -qa' or if you need to list all the packages and dependencies associated with it use 'yum list installed'

Upvotes: 0

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