Get info about installed and remote packages with pacman

Using --info

Taking vi as an example, to get information about its locally installed package use

pacman -Q --info vi 

This produces

Name : vi Version : 1:070224-2 Description : The original ex/vi text editor Architecture : x86_64 URL : http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/ Licenses : custom:ex Groups : base Provides : None Depends On : ncurses Optional Deps : s-nail: used by the preserve command for notification [installed] Required By : None Optional For : None Conflicts With : None Replaces : None Installed Size : 290.00 KiB Packager : Evangelos Foutras <[email protected]> Build Date : Sun 06 Sep 2015 09:34:15 PM CEST Install Date : Mon 03 Oct 2016 07:18:13 PM CEST Install Reason : Explicitly installed Install Script : No Validated By : Signature 

Alternatively use the shorter -i option:

pacman -Qi vi 

To only get the value of a specific package property, let's say the description, there's good old grep to filter the output:

pacman -Qi vi | grep -Po '^Description\s*: \K.+' 

Which prints

The original ex/vi text editor

A short explanation of the grep command above:

• -P activates Perl-compatible regular expressions
• -o print only the matched parts of a matching line, not the whole line
• ^Description\s*: \K.+ is the regex: The line must start with "Description" followed by any number of whitespace characters, followed by ": ". Then:
  • \K resets the starting point of the match. The matched characters starting with "Description" are not included in the final match
  • Finally, .+ matches everything afterwards, which is the package description

Here's a general answer on how to remove known prefixes from lines.

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Getting information from the remote repository works similar:

pacman -Si vi 

When you only know parts of the package's name, use the -s option:

pacman -Ss jdk 

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To find out which packages depend on a certain package — for example if you're wondering why a package exists on your system — you can use pactree:

pactree -r intel-media-driver 

which produces a nice dependency tree:

intel-media-driver └─intel-media-sdk └─ffmpeg ├─electron6 │ └─code ├─firefox ├─freerdp │ └─wlroots │ └─sway ├─qt5-webengine │ └─python2-pyqtwebengine │ └─calibre ├─unpaper │ └─ocrmypdf ├─vlc └─wf-recorder-git 

Minimal package browser

Combining the previous commands with fzf allows for a minimal textual package browser.

For local packages:

cmd='(pacman -Qi {}; pactree -r {})'; pacman -Q --quiet | fzf --preview "$cmd" 

For remote packages:

cmd='pacman -Si {2}'; pacman -S --list | fzf --preview "$cmd" 

You can scroll the preview with Shift+↑ and Shift+↓.

To open the preview in your editor with Enter, change the command to:

fzf --preview "$cmd" --bind "enter:execute($EDITOR <($cmd))" 

Here the contents of the preview are passed to your editor using process substitution.

You might also add this to install a remote package with Alt+Enter:

--bind "alt-enter:execute(sudo pacman -S {2})"