Some notes on equery, the package query tool provided on Gentoo systems by the gentoolkit package.
More notes about equery can be found in my Gentoo notes.
List all installed packages
equery list
equery list output
From man equery:
$ equery list binutils
* Searching for binutils ...
[I--] [??] sys-devel/binutils-2.18-r1:i686-pc-linux-gnu-2.18
[IP-] [ ~] sys-devel/binutils-2.19.1-r1:i686-pc-linux-gnu-2.19.1
- Location field ([IPO-])
- The first field shows the location and install status of the package. It consists of three letters in square brackets. I indicates the package is currently installed. P indicates the package is available in the Portage tree. O indicates the package is available in at least one overlay. - is a place holder and has no meaning. [I-O] would mean that the package is installed and available from an overlay, but not available from the Portage tree.
- Mask-status field ([ ~M-??])
- The second field shows the mask status of the package. Empty brackets indicate that the package is unmasked. A ~ means the package is masked by keyword, e.g., you are running a stable system and the package is marked testing). M means hard masked, e.g., the package maintainer has determined the package is unfit for widespread usage. - means arch masked, e.g., you are running an amd64 system, but this package only works on x86. Lastly, ?? only occurs when the location field is [I–]. Together, they indicate that the package was installed from the Portage tree or an overlay, but has since been removed from that tree; therefore equery can not determine a mask status for it.
List installed packages matching a name
You can provide equery with a package name, which has to be an exact match:
equery list [name]
Or you can use the -f flag to do use a regular expression (the f stands for “full regex”). For example, this will show all packages with “gnome” in their name:
equery list -f gnome*
