Aura-as-Pacman
aura
can be used in place of pacman
in all situations. At the very least,
this is two fewer letters to type!
Below are some common pacman
idioms for managing your system. The list is a
handy reference but not exhaustive. For everything that pacman
is capable of,
see man pacman
.
To find out how to use Aura to interact with the AUR, continue to the next page.
Package Installation and Updates
Install an official package
sudo aura -S firefox
💡 Note: Like with
pacman
,sudo
must be used for all "admin" actions.
Update all official packages
The classic command.
sudo aura -Syu
Install a package built with makepkg
sudo aura -U foobar-1.2.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
Removing Packages
The package and all unneeded dependencies
From the manpage of pacman
:
This operation is recursive and analogous to a backwards
--sync
operation, and it helps keep a clean system without orphans.
sudo aura -Rsu firefox
The package and everything that depends on it
Use this with care. See man pacman
for more details.
sudo aura -Rcu firefox
Querying your System
Searching an exact package
aura -Qi firefox
Searching a local package by description
> aura -Qs browser
local/chromium 83.0.4103.61-1
A web browser built for speed, simplicity, and security
local/firefox 76.0.1-1
Standalone web browser from mozilla.org
local/qt5-webengine 5.14.2-3 (qt qt5)
Provides support for web applications using the Chromium browser project
Producing a list of installed packages
> aura -Q
a52dec 0.7.4-11
aalib 1.4rc5-14
accounts-qml-module 0.7-2
acetoneiso2 2.3-10
... etc ...
Discovering what package owns a certain file
> aura -Qo /usr/bin/firefox
/usr/bin/firefox is owned by firefox 76.0.1-1
Discovering which files are brought in by a package
> aura -Ql firefox
firefox /usr/
firefox /usr/bin/
firefox /usr/bin/firefox
firefox /usr/lib/
firefox /usr/lib/firefox/
firefox /usr/lib/firefox/Throbber-small.gif
firefox /usr/lib/firefox/application.ini
... etc ...
You can use grep
to filter what you're looking for:
> aura -Ql firefox | grep bin
firefox /usr/bin/
firefox /usr/bin/firefox
firefox /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin
Clearing your Package Cache
Pacman and Aura store built packages in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/
. This directory
can grow quite large, but the following commands can help selectively clear it.
💡 Tip: The Aura command
-Cc
offers additional control over clearing the cache.
Removing the tarballs of uninstalled packages
sudo aura -Sc
Removing all tarballs
sudo aura -Scc