Pacman Search - Shell-Bash

Pacman is a package manager used in Arch Linux and its derivatives. The pacman command provides a number of options to search for packages available in the Arch Linux repositories. In this article, we will be discussing how to use pacman search command to search for packages in the Arch Linux repositories.

Syntax

The pacman search command has the following syntax:

pacman search [options] [expression]

Where:

• options: It is optional and specifies any additional options for the pacman search command.
• expression: It is also optional and specifies the search expression for the pacman search command.

Basic usage

To search for a package using pacman search, simply type pacman search followed by the package name:

pacman search <package_name>

For example, to search for the package named vlc, we would use the following command:

pacman search vlc

This would return a list of packages matching the search expression:

extra/vlc 3.0.16-1
    A multi-platform MPEG, VCD/DVD, and DivX player

community/freeplayer 20210625-1
    Chinese video website API support, no ads video player

community/ff2mpv 20210418-1
    Open youtube video in mpv

community/gnome-mpv 0.16-1
    Simple GTK+ frontend for MPV

community/guvcview 2.0.6-2
    GTK+ base UVC Viewer

multilib/lib32-libavcodec 58.91.100-1
    The FFmpeg codec libraries (32-bit)

multilib/lib32-libavformat 58.45.100-1
    The FFmpeg format libraries (32-bit)

multilib/lib32-libavutil 56.134.100-1
    The FFmpeg utility libraries (32-bit)

multilib/lib32-libpostproc 58.91.100-1
    Video postprocessing libraries for the ffmpeg codec library (32-bit)

multilib/lib32-libswresample 3.10.100-1
    FFmpeg software resampling library (32-bit)

multilib/lib32-libswscale 5.10.100-1
    FFmpeg image scaling and conversion libraries (32-bit)

Advanced usage

We can also use wildcards (*) in the search expression to search for packages that match a pattern. For example, to search for all packages that start with the letter g, we would use the following command:

pacman search g*

This would return a list of packages whose names start with the letter g:

core/gettext 0.21-4
    Internationalization and localization gettext utilities

extra/gcc 11.1.0-1 (base-devel)
    The GNU Compiler Collection - C and C++ frontends

extra/gdb 10.2-2 (base-devel)
    The GNU Debugger

extra/generators 1.6-1 (make)
    List all files installed by a given package

extra/gifsicle 1.92-1
    A powerful tool for manipulating GIF images

extra/git 2.32.0-1
    the fast distributed version control system

extra/glib2 2.68.3-1
    Low level core library for GNOME

extra/gnome-common 3.18.0-4 (gnome)
    Deprecated package, please use gnome-devel-docs, gnome-getting-started-docs, gnome-app-devel-docs, gtk-doc and yelp-tools which contains all the documentation you need.

...

We can also use regular expressions to search for packages. For example, to search for all packages that contain the word java, we would use the following command:

pacman search java

This would return a list of packages that match the search expression:

core/icedtea-web 1.8-2
    Free web browser plugin to run applets written in Java and an implementation of Java Web Start

extra/java-environment-common 3-3
    Common files needed for environment independent Java development

extra/java-runtime-common 3-3
    Common files of Java Runtime Environment

extra/intellij-idea-community-edition 2021.1.3-1
    An Intelligent Java IDE, community edition

extra/intellij-idea-ultimate-edition 2021.1.3-1
    An Intelligent Java IDE, ultimate edition

extra/jdk-openjdk 16.0.2.u7-1
    OpenJDK Java 16 development kit

extra/jre-openjdk 16.0.2.u7-1
    OpenJDK Java 16 runtime

extra/jupyter-notebook 6.4.0-1
    The Jupyter HTML Notebook

extra/python-py4j 0.10.9-3
    Py4J enables Python programs running in a Python interpreter to dynamically access Java objects in a Java Virtual Machine. 

...

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed how to use the pacman search command to search for packages available in the Arch Linux repositories. We covered the basic usage of the pacman search command as well as some advanced features like using wildcards and regular expressions. The pacman search command is a powerful tool that allows us to quickly search for packages that we need in our Arch Linux system.