[CentOS] rpm -q versus what's installed

Thu Jun 5 18:17:16 UTC 2008
MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>

On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 2:56 AM, William L. Maltby
<CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 23:27 -0400, Scott R. Ehrlich wrote:
>> I am trying to install Oracle client 10g (10.2.0) on a 64-bit CentOS 5.0
>> system.
>>
>> 'rpm -q make gcc glibc etc' reveals some packages as "not installed", yet
>> a yum install <package name> consistently returns Nothing to do. Yum list
>> available <package name> yields nothing needed.
>>
>> If rpm -q <list of packages> lists some that are "not installed" but every
>> variant of yum install and yum list I've tried and googled claiims nothing
>> more needs to be installed, either the OS is misreporting (I doubt that)
>> or I'm missing something that is not easily being revealed, or that I
>> haven't used in a long time and outright forgetting.
>
> A common error is to not give the correct name to rpm. Try
>
>   rpm -qa | grep <part of the pkg name>
>
> I often forget to add such trivial stuff as ".i386" to the package name.
>
> Ditto for yum. Just do a yum list all into some file and then view the
> file.
>
> Also, yum list all into a file might be useful. It shows installed and
> available.
>

I have a couple of aliases you might find useful for this:

alias rg='rpm -qa | grep -i'
alias yg='yum list | grep -i'

They're not terribly efficient, but I don't use them that often,
either.  Also, I have a setting in my .rpmmacros (or .rpmrc) file at
home that specifies to list the machine type along with the file name
- I can't remember it (or find it) right now, but I got it here, so
someone knows....

(Figures that I wouldn't have it here....)

HTH

mhr