[CentOS] forcing yum to download but not install

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:39 AM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> Is there any way to fake a "yum update" just to get yum to force a download
> of all the files it needs, without actually installing them.

Do a 'yum install yum-downloadonly', and then you can 'yum -y
--downloadonly update'.  This is also useful to prepare for where you
want to baby-sit an update but don't want to wait for the downloads to
happen.  A subsequent 'yum update' then goes very quickly.

> I finally have a RPM cache/proxy working and I just want to populate it.

Note that if you are using a squid or similar http proxy, it will work
to cache rpms as long as you have it configured to keep large files,
but if you don't modify each client you'll end up pulling a copy from
several different mirrors into your cache.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com