pacfind - a more powerful pacman search tool

NOTE: This software is still very alpha and is prone to frequent segfaults and memory leaks. That being said, it is already capable of fairly advanced queries.

Usage

pacfind [-QSqsedtm] [--] [OP] [FIELD] [CMP] value [JOIN] ...

Options

-Q	Search installed packages. May be combined with -S.
-S	Search sync packages. May be combined with -Q.
-q	Only print the names of matching packages.
-s	No-op, provided for compatibility with pacman.
-e	Limit to explicitly installed packages.
-d	Limit to packages installed as dependencies.
-t	Limit to unneeded packages.
-m	Limit to packages not in a repo.

Query Syntax

Operators

• -not
• -go - group queries
• -gc - close query group

Fields

If no field is specified name and description will be searched.

String Scalars

• -name
• -desc
• -filename
• -url
• -packager
• -version
• -md5sum
• -sha256sum

Package Lists

Package list fields may be used alone or with a sub-selector separated by a period. When used alone the package field will be searched directly for the term. When used with a sub-selector, the field will be expanded to the packages it includes which will then be searched normally. For example, pacfind -Q -- -depends bash will find only those packages which explicitly depend on bash whereas pacfind -Q -- -depends.name bash will also find packages whose dependency on sh is satisfied by bash. In the second form, these may be followed by '%' to search recursively.

• -depends
• -optdepends
• -conflicts
• -provides
• -replaces
• -requiredby - pacfind will NOT limit this to local packages; you probably only want to use this in conjunction with -Q.

String Lists

• -license
• -group

Comparison Operators

If no comparison operator is provided -re will be used for string fields and -eq for numeric fields.

• -eq
• -ne
• -gt
• -ge
• -lt
• -le
• -re
• -nr

Join Operators

If no join operator is provided, -and will be used.

• -and
• -or
• -xor

Examples

Find libreoffice packages but exclude language packs:

pacfind -Q -- -name -re libreoffice -not -desc -re lang

Find broken packages:

pacfind -Q -- -packager allan

Find packages that depend on a package that depends on perl:

pacfind -Q -- -depends.depends.name perl

Pacman style searching:

pacfind -Q pacman mirrorlist

Search only explicitly installed packages:

pacman -Qqe | pacfind -- -desc perl

Search for packages with perl anywhere in their dependency chains:

pacfind -- -depends%.name perl

License

pacfind is distributed under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for details.

TODO

• Add --format option
• Complete feature parity with pacman -Qs and pacman -Ss
• Pacman style output
• Allow human readable dates and sizes for values -isize -gt 50MB
• List field counts
• Fix the multitude of segfaults and memory leaks
• Optimize node resolution order
• Threads
• Remaining Fields:
  • satisifes
  • script
  • installreason
  • size
  • date