How to Find Out if Package is Installed in Red Hat Enterprise / Fedora Linux / Suse Linux / Cent OS?

To install or upgrade or remove any package / program / software in Red Hat Enterprise / Fedora Linux / Suse Linux / Cent OS operating, you need to do check firstly whether that desire package is installed on your computer. Linux has several distribution. I like Fedora and Red Hat Linux. So, the command to find out if package is installed in Linux is fully depend upon your Linux distribution. In this page, you will find out if package is installed in Red Hat Enterprise / Fedora Linux / Suse Linux / Cent OS.

It is very easy to find out if package is installed in Red Hat Enterprise / Fedora Linux / Suse Linux / Cent OS. To do this we just have to use the command rpm. Follow the following steps to find out if package is installed in Red Hat Enterprise / Fedora Linux / Suse Linux / Cent OS:

Step 1: Open the terminal window from Application -> System Tools -> Terminal. This will open the terminal window of your Linux computer.

Step 2: To find the installed package information we need to use the rpm command. Type the following command in the terminal window of Red Hat Enterprise / Fedora Linux / Suse Linux / Cent OS and then hit Enter key to execute the command.

$ rpm -qa | grep {package-name}

where, "package-name" implies the actual package name

For example, to find out the package pidgin is installed or not, we have to type the following command in the terminal window:

[me@localhost ~]$ rpm -qa | grep pidgin

The output of the above command looks like the following:

pidgin-2.7.9-1.fc14.i686

Note: Pidgin is a nice and tiny software for the Linux based operating system. Using this, anyone can login multiple messangers like gtalk, yahoo, msn and many more. For details, you may read the following articl:

Sometimes, you may not get the output if the package is not installed. So, if you do not get any output ( the installed package name along with version), this simply means that the package is not installed at all.

There is another useful command which can display list all installed packages. The command is like the following:

$ rpm -qa

And that's all. Using the above mentioned tutorial, you can easily find out if the desired package is Installed in Red Hat Enterprise / Fedora Linux / Suse Linux / Cent OS.

@This tutorial is written by rancidTaste