How to display an additional package information using yum and yumdb – RedHat Linux

There are two handy tools to help you provide an additional information about system packages. The first tool is the package manager yum and the second is yumdb. Both tools display a different type of information. The other difference is that yumdb command can be only used on packages currently installed on the system.

yum info

The yum command can display an information about the package even if it is not currently installed. This is a handy way of querying additional information before the actual installation is performed. This can be done by using info option. The following is a default output when using yum info to query a package information. In the following example we will query some additional information about at package:

# yum info at
Loaded plugins: product-id, subscription-manager
Available Packages
Name        : at
Arch        : x86_64
Version     : 3.1.13
Release     : 17.el7
Size        : 50 k
Repo        : RHEL_7_Disc
Summary     : Job spooling tools
URL         : http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/at
License     : GPLv3+ and GPLv2+ and ISC and MIT and Public Domain
Description : At and batch read commands from standard input or from a specified
            : file. At allows you to specify that a command will be run at a
            : particular time. Batch will execute commands when the system load
            : levels drop to a particular level. Both commands use user's shell.
            : 
            : You should install the at package if you need a utility for
            : time-oriented job control. Note: If it is a recurring job that will
            : need to be repeated at the same time every day/week, etc. you should
            : use crontab instead.

yumdb info

The different set of information about any currently installed package can be retrieved by yumdb command. The yumdb command may be missing as it may not be installed on your system by default. To make the yumdb command available you first need to install yum-utils package.

[root@rhel7 ~]# yum install yum-utils

Once installed you can use yumdb command to obtain additional information about any currently installed package. Once again we use at package as an example. Below you can see a default output of yumdb info command:

[root@rhel7 ~]# yumdb info at
Loaded plugins: product-id
at-3.1.13-17.el7.x86_64
     checksum_data = 6257ddee132d91801cf303fe6f0660de6e8da64c2c132203ae54861f3667bdc3
     checksum_type = sha256
     command_line = install at
     from_repo = RHEL_7_Disc
     from_repo_revision = 1399448732
     from_repo_timestamp = 1399448734
     installed_by = 0
     reason = user
     releasever = 7Server
     var_uuid = bd54f3b1-8d8c-4e79-9384-084d9a58d544