On Sat, 2005-07-16 at 23:55 +1000, Rohan Walsh wrote:

...

This is also answer to everybody else who was nitpicking...

I believe that OP ment a GUI front end when he said "no package manager". If he's running CentOS, then he has rpm installed, and most of his system (if not everything) was installed by rpm. I fail to understand why so many people are trying to be smart, instead of being helpfull. Luckily, at least Jay (haven't checked entire thread, maybe there were others) gave a helpfull answer (hint to the OP, "man rpm" contains answer to your question, as well as many other usefull options for rpm command).

You know, there's difference between "smart" and "smart ass". Nitpicking will more often get you closer to later then the former ;-)

Alexandar, he was asked the question in an interview, as far as we know not related to his CentOS system. Nobody, including the OP (and very possibly the interviewer) is really sure what the interviewer meant. I don't think anybody has been a "smart ass"

Well, the easy way to figure out what is provided by an RPM ... if you do not have RPM installed (though why you would care if you are not going to install RPM, I'm not sure) ... would be to use rpm2cpio and cpio to either extract the file list or to extract the entire RPM into a test directory.

That is how we compare our RPMs to upstream ones to make sure we link to the same libraries and have the same provides, requires, files, etc.

There are several services ( http://rpm.pbone.net/ being my favorite) that also provide file lists for every RPM they track, including CentOS and WBEL.