How to check available package versions in rpm systems?

Question

If I want to check available versions of a package in Debian, I run apt-cache policy pkgname which in the case of wajig gives:

wajig:
  Installed: 2.01
  Candidate: 2.01
  Version table:
 *** 2.01 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.0.47 0
        500 file:/home/wena/.repo_bin/ squeeze/main i386 Packages
        500 ftp://ftp.is.co.za/debian/ squeeze/main i386 Packages

That means that there are three wajig packages, one that is installed (/var/lib/dpkg/status), and two others (which are the same version). One of these two is in a local repository and the other is available from a remote repository.

How do I achieve a similar result on rpm systems?

Answer 1

yum

Provides the command list to display information about installed and upgradeable package.

yum list <package>

zypper

Can return a detailed list of available and installed packages or patches.

zypper search -s <package>

Adding --exact-match can help, if there are multiple packages.

As a side-note, here is a comparison of package-management commands.

Answer 2

To query the available packages, you can do urpmq --sources YOURPACKAGE This is Mandriva-specific (I only know Mandriva).

If you want to know the version of an installed package : rpm -q YOURPACKAGE This works on all RPM systems.

On RedHat/Fedora, see yum.

Answer 3

Running the below commands shall give you all the installed packages on the server.

rpm -qa | grep <packagename>

More rpm commands are listed here