[solved] List of pacman -S variations

Question

This comes just after being helped with another (dumb, newbie) problem. The solution involved invoking pacman -S**
There are so many variations of the -S suffixes. I know -Ss shows which options are available. -Syu upgrades, and evidently so does
-Syyu. There seem to be a lot of options, and when I searched Google just now for "pacman -S**"....it brought up the old pacman game from Atari!
I know there's a list somewhere. I just took a quick (cheap and trashy!) stab at it in the wiki and came up blank. Is there a list of -S suffixes?
Last edited by pottzie (2011-06-20 03:39:29)

Answer 1

I mostly use the following commands:
pacman -Syu (synchronise package list with servers, then update all outdated packages on system)
pacman -Ss <package_name> (search for <package_name> in package list and display details of matches)
pacman -S <package_name> (install <package_name> and dependencies)
pacman -Qi <package_name> (give details of an installed package, its dependencies, etc.)
pacman -Qo <file_name> (see which package owns the file - i.e. why it was installed)
pacman -Sc (clear the cache of old files - I only use this on my netbook as it has very little disk space)
According to the man pages, "pacman -Syyu" (i.e. two y's) will download package lists even if they appear to be up-to-date.
I also use yaourt to install packages from AUR.  You can use it in the same way as pacman (e.g. yaourt -Syu), but I didn't initially realise that it should never be run as root and that it will install updates from the main repositories (instead of AUR) unless you use the --aur switch like this:
yaourt -Syu --aur
I'm sure you've figured all this out now, but I just thought I'd post in case it helps... :-)