I wrote a script that wraps some more complicated features of pacman. You can get it from the AUR if you’re on Arch at aur/pacext-git or manually on GitHub

Motivation

Pacman is ArchLinux’s excellent package manager. Its main philosophies are to provide an open interface to your packages that can be utilised in other programs to do more complicated things. Because of this, it’s feature set can be a little daunting when you first look into it. For example, say you wanted to find the program that provides a binary, say grep. How would you do it?

In the Enterprise Linux world, dnf provides a very intuitive subcommand, provides. You just type:

$ dnf provides grep

and dnf will spit the package plus anywhere else that you could get the package from:

$ dnf provides grep
grep-2.20-3.el8.x86_64 : Pattern matching utilities
Repo        : base
grep-2.20-3.el8.x86_64 : Pattern matching utilities
Repo        : @anaconda

Now lets say you wanted to do this for ArchLinux’s pacman. What subcommand would you use? Well, pacman defines its subcommands like so:

  1. A hyphen -
  2. A capital letter, denoting an “operation”
  3. Zero or many lowercase letters, denoting options to apply to that operation

In this case, the correct options are capital “Q” for the Query operation, lowercase “o” for querying the owner of the file. So in full:

$ pacman -Qo grep
/usr/bin/grep is owned by grep 3.7-1

Okay, that’s not too terrible. But what if you wanted to list the packages dependencies? What if you also needed those dependencies’ descriptions? What if you needed a list of packages that depended on the given package, plus their descriptions. Most modern package managers provide a vast amount of options to allow for this, but Arch tries not to repeat itself with more functions that aren’t strictly necessary, since you can get all this through the highly programmable pre-existing interface.

That being said, it’s always nice to have these functions, which is why I’ve written them.

Example usages

So what are some examples of how pacext could be used. Well we can take the two examples from before:

Listing dependencies and their descriptions

pacext lets us do this with either the --whatdepends flag or -d for short:

$ pacext -d grep
glibc 2.33-5
    GNU C Library
pcre 8.45-1
    A library that implements Perl 5-style regular expressions

As you can see, we get the descriptions and versions of the given packages.

Listing what packages depend on this package + their descriptions

Similarly, we can do this with --whatrequires or -r:

$ pacext -r grep
base 2-2
    Minimal package set to define a basic Arch Linux installation
git 2.34.1-1
    the fast distributed version control system
mkinitcpio 31-2
    Modular initramfs image creation utility

Other features

The design of this tool makes it easy to add other features because of its shell script nature. You’re welcome to help with a pull request if you know how to code and use ArchLinux.