Emerge update package list

The utility equery provides information about the packages, use flags and other good stuffs. There are short options available, long options used for descriptive purposes. Say equery with no options to view short options and other commands. Portage can remove packages too, it will also suggest a list of packages that aren't needed that may be removed at the administrators discretion. This little BASH snippet will iterate over every package installed and use equery to determine it's dependencies.

Biz Dev Sys Blog. You can obtain it by issuing this command:. Tell which installed package provides a command using equery :. Tell which not installed package provides a command using e-file :. Obtain descriptions and usage of the USE flag X using euse :. Gather more information on euse by reading its manual page:. Install genlop by issuing:.

Overlays vary from very small to very large in size. As a result they slow down the majority of Portage operations. That happens because overlays do not contain metadata caches. The cache is used to speed up searches and the building of dependency trees. A neat trick is to generate local metadata cache after syncing overlays. This trick also works in conjunction with eix. Use qcheck to verify installed packages:.

Learn more about qcheck by reading its manual page:. This is generally a bad idea, specially if you have no idea what you are doing. These packages are randomly specified by the nice gentoo development theme and configured in:.

If you are wondering if there is a later version of a package than what is available as a masked package in portage, try:. Gentoo lists the latest available and installed version of a package when you do a standard search:.

But the 'emerge' tool can't make a list of all installed packages. To do so, Install Gentoolkit not installed by default :. To view what's changed between the latest available version of a program and the latest installed version, use etcat -c.

Read the qpkg manpage for more information. You can use qpkg to find out if you got more than one version of the same program installed.