Mar 26, 2012

5 Tips and Tricks for Using Yum


If you're using one of the Fedora/Red Hat derived Linux distributions, odds are you spend some time working with Yum. You probably already know the basics, like searching packages and how to install or remove them. But if that's all you know, you're missing out on a lot of features that make Yum interesting. Let's take a look at a few of the less commonly used Yum features.

Yum comes with a lot of different distributions, but I'm going to focus on Fedora here. Mainly because that's what I'm running while I'm writing this piece. I believe most, if not all, of this should apply to CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc., but if not, you may need to check your man pages or system documentation.

Working with Groups

If you use the PackageKit GUI, you can view and manage packages by groups. This is pretty convenient if you want to install everything for a MySQL database or all packages you should need for RPM development.

But, what if you (like me) prefer to use the command line? Then you've got the group commands.

To search all groups, use yum group list. This will produce a full list of available groups to install or remove. (Yum lists the groups by installed groups, installed language groups, and then available groups and language groups.)

To install a group, use yum group install "group name". Note that you may need quotes because most group names are two words. If you need to remove the group, just use yum group remove "group name".

Want to learn more about a group? Just use yum group info with the group name.

Love the Yum Shell

If you're going to be doing a lot of package management, you want to get to know the Yum shell.

Just run yum shell and you'll be dumped in the Yum shell. (Which makes sense. It'd be weird if you got a DOS prompt or something...) Now you can run whatever Yum commands you need to until you're ready to exit the Yum shell.

For instance, want to search packages? Just type search packagename.

Here's the primary difference, when running things like install or remove, Yum will not complete the transaction immediately. You need to issue the run command to tell Yum to do it. This gives..............

Read more at linux.com

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