Is there a way to download specific base files from pacstrap base?

Question

Lets say I tinker with something and mess up the file. I can of course redownload the entire base files using pacstrap, but is there a way to just query a specific file and download that?
Lets talk about fstab for a moment. I ran the script
# genfstab -U -p /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab
and instead of using the append redirector I used only the redirect of > which clears everything other than what you are adding.
So because I do not know if there was any code and I also want to know what the original fstab file looked like. I would like to reload only this file. Is this possible? Or do I have to redownload all the base files again?
This serves 2 purposes: Learn to load only single files and to learn about the original look of the fstab file.
thank you.

Answer 1

WorMzy wrote:
It depends where you extract the file to. If you extract it to your home directory so you can examine it's content, there's no problem -- it's just a static file. If you're extracting it over the existing file (in this case /etc/fstab), then you may end up screwing up permissions/ownership.
I've not experimented with redirection enough to know whether the original file's permissions are preserved.
maybe a chmod fix if needed?
So I am having a problem because it keeps saying fstab might be a file and when I query I do not see the package /file. So help me understand by this similar question.
This works fine.
# pacman -S iw wpa_supplicant
but using query does not find any package that resembles iw wpa_supplicant
# pacman -Q
Nothing in the list resembles the package above. It seems to me I just do not understand repositories (I think that is what these are called).
Is there a good link or article that can clear this up? Also... how can I find out how to query files that contain certain characters in the package name such as lib* or *lib*?