How to find out an apps package name?

General system Newbie
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So I wanna learn the Termina and I really don’t want to use Pamac but I’m still not that good with it so I hope you can help a newbie out. I got several apps installed. I tried to uninstall some of them but it seems like yay -R (name) is not working because the name of the app is not the name of the package. So how do I find out the package name of the app so I can uninstall it? I used Pamac for this in the past but I don’t want to use a GUI for this anymore.

Example: QT Assistant, QT Designer, QT Linguist and QT Bus Viewer have been installed on my system.

  1. does anybody know what packages need them? I don’t know what packages installed those. Could it be Steam? I’m asking because I don’t remember installing them on my own.

  2. So I want to uninstall them. What’s the best way of finding their names the easy, terminal way and how do I know that some apps won’t need those apps?

1 Like
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pactree -r <packagename>

3

Have you had a look at this?i
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks#Listing_packages

I’m not an expert but it might help, think there is also a video using pacman here

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Another ‘trick’ is to use yay to show you what is present. If you try yay qt (or pacman -Ss qt) you will get a PILE of possibilities, but only those you have installed will say so beside their name. Just take note of those names, and try to uninstall them…

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Just adding a bit to what @freebird54 said:

pacman -Ss qt | grep installed

3 Likes
6

You can also right click the app icon and select to edit its command. There you’ll see exactly the command name.

Then you can use command

pacman -Qo <commandname>

to see which package it belongs.

2 Likes
7

Those are all part of qt5-tools and/or qt6-tools depending on which you have installed. You can use pactree as described above by @daab to see if you need them.

There are quite a lot of ways:

  • pacman -Qs qt
  • pacman -Q | grep qt
  • pacman -Qo <filename from package>
  • If you have it installed you can use pkgfile
  • Probably more :slight_smile:

You don’t need to search the entire repos and then get the installed ones. The same commands with pacman -Q instead of pacman -S will search your installed packages.

3 Likes
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The only difficulty I see with the -Q version of the command is that it seems to find a LOT more entries, even though qt is specified as a search term (on my system).

  1. pacman -Ss qt | grep installed 41 entries
  2. pacman -Qs qt 84 entries

Not sure why this should be, but the descriptions seem not all to be qt related in the -Q version of the command. Still makes quite a lst to go through though! Is there a command tweak to locate the meta-packages (or whatever they’re called) that probably got them installed originally?

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That is because by grepping for “installed”, you are removing the package descriptions.

If you don’t want the descriptions you could use pacman -Qsq qt or pacman -Q | grep qt

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Still a bit confusing - as the descriptions were there before the grep command - and the -Q was already only looking in installed pkgs, right? Regardless, it does reduce the count a lot - to 42. Just not getting my head around entries like:

local/zbar 0.23.1-9
    Application and library for reading bar codes from various sources

as I don’t see any qt references there…

Oh well - learning as I go… :grin:

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