pkg_info1

Usage

Overview

The pkg_info command is used to dump out information for packages, as created by pkg_create(1), which may be still packed up or already installed on the system with the pkg_add(1) command.

The pkg-name may be the name of an installed package, the pathname to a package distribution file, or a URL to a package available through FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, or SCP. pkg_info will try to complete pkg-name with a version number while looking through installed packages. If no pkg-name is specified, pkg_info shows the names and one-line comments for all installed packages except internal packages.

When browsing through uninstalled packages, running pkg_info -I *.tgz will report a summary line for each package, so that it is possible to run pkg_info pkgname.tgz to obtain a longer package description, and pkg_add -n pkgname.tgz to check that the installation would proceed cleanly, including dependencies.

The following command-line options are supported:

-A

Show the names and one-line comments for all installed packages, including internal packages. This option cannot be combined with pkg-name arguments.

-a

Show the names and one-line comments for all installed packages except internal packages. This option cannot be combined with pkg-name arguments. It is the default when neither options nor arguments are given.

-C

Show certificate information for signed packages.

-c

Show the one-line comment field for each package.

-D name[=value]

Enforce extra options as given by name, similarly to pkg_add(1).

SIGNER

List of trusted signers, separated by commas. Corresponds to list of public keys under /etc/signify we want to trust. Defaults to any key matching ‘*pkg’ for packages, and any key matching ‘*fw’ for firmware.

snap

Force ‘%c’ and ‘%m’ to expand to ‘snapshots’, even on a release kernel.

unsigned

Allow opening unsigned packages without warnings/errors (necessary for ports(7), automatically set by the build infrastructure).

-d

Show the long-description field for each package.

-E filename

Look for the package(s) that contains the given filename. As a faster alternative, note that there is a package, pkglocatedb, that contains a locate(1) database of every file in every package.

-e pkg-name

This option allows you to test for the presence of another (perhaps prerequisite) package from a script. If the package identified by pkg-name is currently installed, return 0, otherwise return 1. In addition, the names of any package(s) found installed are printed to stdout unless turned off using the -q option.

The given pkg-name is actually a package specification, as described in packages-specs(7). For example, pkg_info -e 'name->=1.3' will match versions 1.3 and later of the name package.

-e pkgpath

Another variant of this option that uses a pkgpath instead. A pkgpath is a location within the ports tree, as described in pkgpath(7). For example, pkg_info -e x11/kde/base3 will match any package that was compiled according to ${PORTSDIR}/x11/kde/base3.

-f

Show the packing-list instructions for each package. See pkg_create(1) and package(5) for the various annotations.

-I

Show the name and one-line comment (“index entry”) for each package. This is done by default if neither options nor arguments are given.

-K

Prefix file names with category keyword (e.g., @file, @lib). Always used together with -L.

-L

Show the files within each package. This is different from just viewing the packing-list, since full pathnames for everything are generated.

-l str

Prefix each information category header (see -q) shown with str. This is primarily of use to front-end programs that want to request a lot of different information fields at once for a package, but don't necessarily want the output intermingled in such a way that they can't organize it. This lets you add a special token to the start of each field.

-M

Show the install-message file (if any) for each package.

-m

Show the names and one-line comments for all packages tagged as manually installed, omitting those automatically installed as dependencies. This option cannot be combined with pkg-name arguments.

-P

Show the pkgpath(7) for each package. You can easily build a subdirlist with this.

-Q substring

Show the names of all packages in the first repository of the package search path containing the substring in the stems of their package names. A stem is a package name with all version and flavor suffixes removed; see pkg_add(1) for more details on stems. If -a is also specified, show the names of all matching packages in all repositories instead.

-q

Be “quiet” in emitting report headers and such, just dump the raw info (basically, assume a non-human reading).

-R

Show which packages require a given package.

-r pkgspec

Check a list for a given pkgspec. The following arguments are names of packages to verify. Exit status will be augmented by 2 if none of the packages do match.

-S

Show the update signature for each package. The ‘update signature’ is a unique tag showing the package name, a global version number, and the version number of every run time dependency and shared library used to build this package.

-s

Show an estimate of the total size of each package.

-t

Show the names and one-line comments for packages which are not required by any other packages. This option cannot be combined with pkg-name arguments.

-U

Show the deinstall-message file (if any) for each package.

-v

Turn on verbose output.

-z

Fuzzy listing option, often used together with -m. Only shows stems, flavors and branches information. To be reused with pkg_add(1) -l to recreate a package installation with different versions and no ambiguity. Note that this intentionally does not include firmware, as they are not handled by pkg_add(1).

Environment

PKG_DBDIR

The standard package database directory, /var/db/pkg, can be overridden by specifying an alternative directory in the PKG_DBDIR environment variable.

PKG_PATH

This can be used to specify a colon-separated list of paths to search for package files. The current directory is always searched first, even if PKG_PATH is set. If PKG_PATH is used, the suffix “.tgz” is automatically appended to the pkg-name, whereas searching in the current directory uses pkg-name literally. Each entry consists of a directory name. URL schemes such as FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, or SCP are also appropriate. The current directory may be indicated implicitly by an empty directory name, or explicitly by a single period (‘./’). Special sequences ‘%a’, ‘%c’, ‘%m’, ‘%v’ will be expanded.

PKG_TMPDIR

Temporary area where package information files will be extracted, instead of /tmp.

TRUSTED_PKG_PATH

Same semantics as PKG_PATH, but it is searched before PKG_PATH and waives any kind of signature checking.

Files

/usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes/

OpenBSD-specific information about individual packages

/var/db/pkg/

database of installed packages(7)

Technical details

Package info is either extracted from package files named on the command line, or from already installed package information in /var/db/pkg/<pkg-name>.