RPM Management Tips

Fedora or RHEL users working with RPMs will find these five little-known features, highligthed on ServerWatch, to be of great value.

Last week, I looked a couple of lesser-known features for working with Debian packages, using dpkg, apt-file and aptitude. This week, I want to look at a few things you can do when working with RPMs if you happen to be on a Fedora or RHEL-derived system.

One thing you may want to do is to see what package owns a file. For this you'll use rpm -qf filename. For example, if you want to know what package owns /usr/lib/libkonq.so.5 then you'd run rpm -qf /usr/lib/libkonq.so.5. On Fedora 15, the command would return kdebase-libs-4.6.3-1.fc15.i686.

Ever been confused about what configuration file or files exist for a package? It's not unusual to install a package (or have a package installed as a default) and not know exactly what configuration files are used to manage it. To determine the configuration files installed with a package, use rpm -qc packagename. Then, to find out what configuration files exist for the gnome-vfs2 package, you'd use rpm -qc gnome-vfs2, which will return:

Read the rest of "5 Tips for Managing RPMs" on ServerWatch.