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I'd like to list all meta packages that I installed.

  • Installed with pikaur or pacman
  • operating system is Arch Linux

Problem

When I install plasma-meta and run pacman -Qg, I can only see plasma. This is, of course, the expected behavior given for the manual entry for the query Q parameter g.

Desired outcome

plasma-meta

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  • Which meta packages are there at all? See package repo and AUR. Commented Mar 12 at 23:08

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pacman -Qqe | grep meta should do the trick.

  • -q suppresses the package version
  • -e filters explicitly installed packages (no dependencies)
  • grep filters the meta packages, assuming they follow the naming convention

-g does not help you here because plasma-meta is not a package group but a metapackage.

Groups vs. Metapackages

Groups and metapackages are solutions to a similar problem, but technically they are very different:

  • A group is a logical group of packages. When you install a group, each package contained in the group gets installed. Groups are a concept supported by your package manager
  • A metapackage is an empty package (i.e. no files are installed) that depends on a bunch of packages. When a metapackage is installed, each dependency gets installed. This does not need special support from the package manager

Because metapackages look just like any other package to pacman, you have to rely on the naming convention with [name]-meta. This should usually work, but some packages might not follow this naming convention.

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pacman -Qqm lists all foreign packages installed from AUR. pacman -Qqe lists packages that were explicitely installed with pacman.

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