Useful Pacman Tips

This post is a rolling release, it will be added to over time

Note: This is a summary and simplification of documentation and other articles that I have read. If you’re a new Arch user, you will find value in this guide. I highly reccomend this article after reading this as well.

Updating your system

Note: Pacman must run as root for commands that move files around

In order to fully update your system you want to use this combination of flags:

sudo pacman -Syu

Don’t run the following commands until you’ve read this whole section. This is merely an explanation:

-Sy will “sync” your package database, but the updates won’t be installed.

after running -Sy you can run -Su to install those updates.

You can think of -Sy as apt-get update and -Su as apt-get upgrade.

On Arch Linux, we run these commands together as -Syu because it is a rolling release distribution and partial upgrades are not supported. More on that here on the official Arch Wiki.

Small Note:

Sometimes, if -Sy or -Syu was recently ran, -Syu will not actually check the remote repository

To force this check, I normally use:

sudo pacman -Syyu

This is safe and achieves the same thing as `-Syu` in most cases.

Searching for packages

To search for a program to download, use the -Ss flag:

pacman -Ss tmux

In this example, we search for tmux:

Installing packages

To install a program, use -S:

sudo pacman -S tmux

I already have tmux installed, so I will type “n” for no here, but you would type “Y” if you wanted to proceed, and Pacman will do the rest.

You can also upgrade the system while installing a package with:

sudo pacman -Syu tmux

Removing packages

Let’s do this the right way, using only -R isn’t as good as you may think.

Start using the following:

sudo pacman -Rns tmux

-R is for removing packages, the -s flag tells Pacman to also remove the dependencies that this package pulled down when it was installed. -n also tells Pacman to also remove system config files associated with this package.

Listing Installed Packages

-Q is used to query everything installed with Pacman.

pacman -Q

How many packages do I have installed?

pacman -Q | wc -l

What packages have I installed? (What is on my machine minus all dependencies)

pacman -Qe

Which package owns a file?

pacman -Qo tmux

How can I list out all files in a package?

pacman -Ql tmux

I don’t want extra information, just the package names!

pacman -Qq

How can I find unused dependencies?

pacman -Qdt

How can I search for a package by name on my machine?

packman -Qs tmux

Main Pacman Flags:

Here is a brief overview of the capital letter flags and their purpose:

-S “sync” installing & updating

-R “remove”

-Q “query” local database

Customizing Pacman

Pacman has a configuration file where you can make some enhancements.

vim /etc/pacman.conf

I use the following options:

# Misc options
#UseSyslog
Color
ILoveCandy
#NoProgressBar
CheckSpace
VerbosePkgLists
ParallelDownloads = 5