Cut the release versions from file in linux

Question

I have a file that contains a list of OS packages with their release versions. I only need the package names and don't need the release versions.

How can I achieve this using Linux commands or any scripts?

Example:

bind-export-libs-9.11.4-26.P2.el7_9.13
bind-export-libs-9.11.4-26.P2.el7_9.7
bind-libs-9.11.4-16.P2.el7
bind-libs-9.11.4-16.P2.el7_8.6
atk-2.28.1-1.el7
atk-2.28.1-2.el7
at-spi2-atk-2.26.2-1.el7
at-spi2-core-2.28.0-1.el7

In the above list, there are duplicate package entries based on the release version.

How can I extract only the package names?

Answer 1

I'm almost sure your list was generated by rpm -qa or something similar, so I'm giving you a command which shows just package names without versions. That could save a lot of work later on:

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME}\n' | sort

Answer 2

Just trim off everything starting with the second-to-last dash.

Using sed:

sed -r 's/-[^-]+-[^-]+$//' file.txt

Basically, the general format of RPM NVRs is <name_possibly_containing_embedded_dashes_or_digits>-<version_never_containing_dashes>-<release_never_containing_dashes>. Dots or digits don't have any special meaning, so searching for them is never going to work properly.

Running this on the output of rpm -qa should produce the exact same list as rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME}\n', as suggested in Artem's answer. Note that there will still be duplicate entries if multiple versions or releases of a single package are installed (the former is the norm for kernel packages or gpg-pubkeys, the latter is typical for i686/x86_64 libraries). Run the result through sort -u if you really only want a list of unique names.

# these two should produce the same output:
rpm -qa | sed -r 's/-[^-]+-[^-]+$//'
rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME}\n'

Answer 3

I think TooTea's answer points the right way, not this, which I will still keep up for reference reasons.

---

Long story short: RPM file name convention is complicated, and as shown below, not unique. There are hence cases where you literally cannot know what the correct package name and versioning is. Still, you can try.

However, since this is complicated, this can't simply be done with sed and regular expressions. Wrong tool for the job. Instead, use Redhat's / Fedora's own tooling. This Python script should give you what you want:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from dnf.subject import Subject
from sys import stdin
from typing import Set
import hawkey


def filename_to_name_candidates(filename: str) -> Set[str]:
    subj = Subject(filename)
    return {
        candidate.name
        for candidate in subj.get_nevra_possibilities(forms=hawkey.FORM_NEVRA)
    }


names = set()

for line in stdin:
    try:
        names = names | filename_to_name_candidates(line)
    except:
        pass

for name in sorted(names):
    print(name)

Save that somewhere (say, as filename2packagename), make it executable, (chmod 755 filename2packagename). You can then just pipe in your file of filenames:

./filename2packagename < listofnames.txt

Answer 4

Edit: You might want to consider TooTea's answer.

Run this, replacing file.txt with the name of your file.

sed 's/-[[:digit:]].*//' file.txt | uniq

Output with your example:

bind-export-libs
bind-libs
atk
at-spi2-atk
at-spi2-core

Explanation:

• The sed commands remove everything starting from the first dash followed by a digit.
• The uniq command then removed duplicate packages.

Note: This will work so long as there's no package whose name contains a dash followed by a digit as part of its name. And so long as every version begins with a digit. If this is not the case, you should update the script accordingly.

Answer 5

Using sed

$ sed -En 's/([^.]*)-.*/\1/;G;/^(.*)\n.*\n\1/d;H;P' input_file
bind-export-libs
bind-libs
atk
at-spi2-atk
at-spi2-core