Useful pacman tools for Arch Linux

Pacman-tools.md

Important: Read the wiki and man pages, before using these tools

Tools

• reflector: rank mirrors and generate pacman mirrorlist
• downgrade: switch to previous versions of programs
• paccache: clean pacman cache (part of pacman package)
• informant: forces reading the Arch News before updating
• pkgfile: check which package contains a command
• pactree: display program dependencies in a tree
• expac: list packages with many options
• pkgstats: shares package statistics with arch developers
• pacdiff: manage .pacnew files

Snippets

Update the mirrors

Updates the mirrors of the specified countries ranking the by the Mirror Score (see: https://www.archlinux.org/mirrors/status/)

cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
reflector -c Hungary -c Germany --sort score --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Cleanup

pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq) #removes orphans
paccache -rk3 #deletes the cached packages, except the last 3 versions
paccache -ruk0 #deletes all the cached packages of uninstalled programs

List explicitly installed packages not in base or base-devel with description

expac "%-20n\t%10d" $(comm -23 <(pacman -Qqen | sort) <({ pacman -Qqg base-devel; expac -l '\n' '%E' base; } ))

Others

• more tools: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks#Utilities
• more tips: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks