Is lsof part of default RHEL installation?

Question

I am trying to find out if lsof is part of a typical RHEL installation. I see lsof mentioned in a RHEL page titled Common administrative commands in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6, 7, and 8 but I do not know enough about Linux administration to know whether this means it will always be there or that it may need to be installed.

I am trying to find this out so I can decide if I need to advise uses to install it, or if they (and my script) can assume it will be there.

On a related note, how do I find out everything that a distro would have?

Answer 1

Your script probably needs to run as root to take full advantage of lsof. In that case, this would suffice:

#! /usr/bin/env bash

which lsof  > /dev/null || (echo Installing lsof. && yum install lsof)

It's probably enough for your documentation to mention that lsof will be installed if missing.

how do I find out everything that a distro would have?

$ yum list, in a VM that you installed with just the defaults.

Answer 2

It does not appear to be installed by default. On a new installation of RHEL 7 I ran

yum list | grep lsof
lsof.x86_64                         4.87-6.el7           rhel-7-server-rhui-rpms

yum list installed | grep lsof
<nothing returned>

This might be important to know with installations for some versions of Solr for example. You can install it with

yum install lsof