lspac is a helper tool for pacman, built using the libalpm library.
It's main purpose is to fetch information about packages from pacman
and print it to the stdout in a way that it's friendly for parsing, so
it facilitates the creation of scripts that deals with pacman package information.
To install lspac simply follow one of the methods below:
Using the AUR
yay -S lspac
or
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/lspac
cd lspac
makepkg -si
Manual installation
git clone https://github.com/pvpscript/lspac
cd lspac
make
sudo make install
lspac [OPTIONS] [<PACKAGE> ...]
-c, --pacman-conf PATH
Set the pacman config file (default '/etc/pacman.conf').
-d, --dbpath PATH
Set pacman dbpath.
-r, --root PATH
Set the filesystem root dir.
-f, --field-delim CHAR
Set the field used between each selected output field (default: tab).
-i, --inner-delim CHAR
Set the inner values delimiter (default: space).
-p, --pkg-delim CHAR
Set the delimiter used between each prompted package.
-o, --output LIST
Set the output fields list (for more information, refer to lspac --help).
-s, --surround CHAR
Set the character used to surround each output value (default: double quotes).
-t, --tarball PATH
Fetches data from a given package tarball.
-S, --select-db DATABASE
Select between local database and sync databases (default: both).
-b, --bytes
Display package size as bytes, instead of human readable.
-P, --pairs
Show outputs in a KEY="VALUE" fashion.
-u, --unix
Display dates as unix timestamp, instead of human readable.
-w, --raw
Remove surrounding characters (overwrites -s).
-B, --basic
Show basic informations about a package.
Same as -o PROVIDES,DEPENDS,REQUIREDBY,OPTIONALFOR,CONFLICTS,REPLACES,CHECKDEPENDS,MAKEDEPENDS
-R, --relations
Show the relations of a given package.
Same as -o DBNAME,BASENAME,VERSION,DESC,ARCH,URL,PACKAGER,SIZE,BUILDDATE,INSTALLDATE
-O, --output-all
Shows every single available output value.
-h, --help
Shows help menu.
-v, --version
Displays version.
For extra help and information about this tool's usage, refer to the lspac(1) manual page.
This project was strongly inspired by lsblk, a tool from
util-linux that lists block devices.
By reading its code, I was able to absorb enough information in how a proper
input parsing is done, as well as the clever enum + struct array solution
for associating numerical values with strings and their respective information.
I really recommend taking a look at the code, it's very concise and very well
written; a delightful experience to the eyes and mind of every programmer.
The library used was the pacman libalpm which is provided with the core pacman package.
It's source code can be found here. Note that
there's still no manual page for this library, as they claim it is still under construction,
but the header file might be able to provide enough information for some development.
Another important project that helped a lot in the development of this tool, was pacutils,
which, by reading their code I've got enough
insight to how the libalpm worked.