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 <evangelos@foutrelis.com>
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 '^Descriptions*: 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
• ^Descriptions*: 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.

---

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

---

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.