[SOLVED] pacman: grep database for specific packages?

Question

$ pacman -Ss zsh
extra/grml-zsh-config 0.9.1-1
grml's zsh setup
extra/zsh 5.0.2-4 [installed]
A very advanced and programmable command interpreter (shell) for UNIX
community/zsh-lovers 0.8.3-2
A collection of tips, tricks and examples for the Z shell.
community/zshdb 0.08-2
A debugger for zsh scripts.
$ pacman -Ss zsh | cut -s -d/ -f2 | grep '^zsh ' | cut -d' ' -f1
zsh
I'm trying to grep pacman output for a specific packages (not just zsh) and receive only the package name as it was passed to pacman as a output (if it exists in the repos that is, otherwise blank / exit 1). The above command works fine in the terminal but when I'm trying to use it from a bash script it only returns blanks. How come?
Simplified version of the script:
tank (zsh ksh)
for x in ${tank[*]}; do
echo $x
present=$(pacman -Qs ${x} | cut -s -d/ -f2 | grep '^${x} ' | cut -d' ' -f1)
echo $present
done
I expect it to return output of a pacman command in the second echo (or blank if there's no packgae like that).
edit: change of title.
2nd edit: added simplified script.
Last edited by thoajdzm (2013-11-16 14:34:59)

Answer 1

Raynman wrote:
And consider using
$ pacman -Ssq '^zsh$'
instead of that pipeline.
Brilliant! Much leaner. However it still doesn't work from a script:
tank=(zsh)
for x in ${tank[*]}; do
echo $x
present=$(pacman -Ssq '^${x}$')
echo $present
done
Second echo returns blank... Am I quoting something wrong?