As I was browsing the Gentoo forums earlier today I found a tool that I’ve not used before which looks really useful. Quite often I wonder what packages depend on others in the portage tree…. but no longer.

mikes-computer ~ # equery depends graphviz
[ Searching for packages depending on graphviz… ]
app-doc/doxygen-1.5.4 (!nodot? >=media-gfx/graphviz-2.6)
media-gfx/imagemagick-6.3.5.10 (graphviz? >=media-gfx/graphviz-2.6)
media-libs/libdvbpsi-0.1.5 (doc? media-gfx/graphviz)

Other cool things this little tool does include:

Listing all the packages that own a given file… For example, if I run the following on /usr/bin/gvim I get the following results telling me that the package app-editor/gvim-7.1.164 owns the file /usr/bin/gvim.

mikes-computer ~ # equery belongs /usr/bin/gvim
[ Searching for file(s) /usr/bin/gvim in *… ]
app-editors/gvim-7.1.164 (/usr/bin/gvim)

Another example is if I do a equery belongs on /etc/resolv.conf which doesn’t belong to any particular package:

mikes-computer ~ # equery belongs /etc/resolv.conf
[ Searching for file(s) /etc/resolv.conf in *… ]

Another useful feature of this tool is the ability to find out what files a package owns….

mikes-computer ~ # equery files gvim
[ Searching for packages matching gvim… ]
* Contents of app-editors/gvim-7.1.164:
/etc
/etc/vim
/etc/vim/gvimrc
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/eview -> gvim
/usr/bin/evim -> gvim
/usr/bin/gview -> gvim
/usr/bin/gvim
/usr/bin/gvimdiff -> gvim
/usr/bin/rgview -> gvim
/usr/bin/rgvim -> gvim
/usr/share
/usr/share/applications
/usr/share/applications/gvim.desktop
/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/share/man/man1/gview.1.bz2 -> vim.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/gvim.1.bz2 -> vim.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/gvimdiff.1.bz2 -> vimdiff.1.bz2
/usr/share/pixmaps
/usr/share/pixmaps/gvim.xpm

I have to admit that I’ve been most impressed with this tool. It can also do a few other things such as listing all the packages with a given use flag:

mikes-computer ~ # equery hasuse mmx
[ Searching for USE flag mmx in all categories among: ]
 * installed packages
[I–] [ ~] net-misc/asterisk-1.2.21.1-r1 (0)
[I–] [ ~] media-sound/mpg123-1.0_rc2 (0)
[I–] [ ~] media-video/ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20070616-r2 (0)
[I–] [ ~] media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc2_p24929 (0)
[I–] [ ~] media-gfx/inkscape-0.45.1-r1 (0)
[I–] [ ~] media-gfx/gimp-2.4.2 (2)
[I–] [  ] media-tv/xawtv-3.95-r1 (0)

Overall this is a really great tool, and if you don’t have it then you can get it by emerging the gentoolkit…. which I found out by:

mikes-computer ~ # which equery
/usr/bin/equery

mikes-computer ~ # equery belongs /usr/bin/equery
[ Searching for file(s) /usr/bin/equery in *… ]
app-portage/gentoolkit-0.2.4_pre8 (/usr/bin/equery)

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Gentoo, Linux, Operating Systems, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.