How to Return List of Packages from Pacman/Yaourt Search

Question

----EDIT----
Changed the name of the script from pacsearch to pacdot.
Apparently yaourt -Ssaq does this, so this script isn't as necessary as I thought. Although, I still find using pacdot -w to open the results in a text document helpful.
----/EDIT----

This isn't a question, but I thought someone else might find this useful. Someone may end up on stackoverflow trying to find a solution like this.

On Arch Linux, I keep finding myself searching with pacman or yaourt and wishing I could get just the package names, not all of the extra stuff. For example, I'd love to be able to run yaourt -Sa $(yaourt -Ssa package). Oddly enough, pacman and yaourt don't seem have this option (not that I can tell, at least), so I wrote a python script to do it. Copy it if you'd like. You can name it what you want, but I'll refer to it as pacdot.py.

pacdot.py package will be like yaourt -Ssa package but only list the package names.

I added a few extra options:

• pacdot.py -o package will only list results from the official Arch repositories, not the AUR.

• pacdot.py -i package will install all the found packages. If you've ever thought about running something like yaourt -Sa $(yaourt -Ssa package), that's what this command does.

• pacdot.py -w package will:

  1. Create a file called 'the-package-you-searched.txt',
  2. Write an example command that would install the found packages,
     (yaourt -Sa all-of-the-results),
  3. Write each result on a new line, and
  4. Open the file for you (with your default text editor).

Here's the code:

#!/bin/python3
import argparse
import re
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, call
from collections import deque


desc = ''.join(('Search the official Arch and AUR databases ',
                'and return package names only. ',
                'e.g.: `pacdot.py arch` will return "arch", ',
                'whereas `$ yaourt -Ssa arch` will return ',
                '"community/arch 1.3.5-10',
                '    A modern and remarkable revision control system."'
                ))
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description=desc)
parser.add_argument('package',
                    help='Package to search with pacman')
parser.add_argument('-o', '--official', action='store_true',
                    help='Search official repositories only, not the AUR')
parser.add_argument('-i', '--install', action='store_true',
                    help='Install found packages')
parser.add_argument('-w', '--write', action='store_true',
                    help='Write to file')

#Set args strings.
args = parser.parse_args()
pkg = args.package
official_only = args.official
install = args.install
write = args.write

# Do yaourt search.
package_search = Popen(['yaourt', '-Ssa', '%s' % pkg], stdout=PIPE).communicate()
# Put each found package into a list.
package_titles_descs = str(package_search[0]).split('\\n')
# Strip off the packages descriptions.
package_titles = [package_titles_descs[i]
                  for i in range(0, len(package_titles_descs), 2)]
# Remove empty item in list.
del(package_titles[-1])

# Make a separate list of the non-aur packages.
package_titles_official = deque(package_titles)
[package_titles_official.remove(p)
    for p in package_titles if p.startswith('aur')]

# Strip off extra stuff like repository names and version numbers.
packages_all = [re.sub('([^/]+)/([^\s]+) (.*)',
                       r'\2', str(p))
                for p in package_titles]
packages_official = [re.sub('([^/]+)/([^\s]+) (.*)',
                            r'\2', str(p))
                     for p in package_titles_official]

# Mark the aur packages.
#     (Not needed, just in case you want to modify this script.)
#packages_aur = packages_all[len(packages_official):]

# Set target packages to 'all' or 'official repos only'
#     based on argparse arguments.
if official_only:
    packages = packages_official
else:
    packages = packages_all

# Print the good stuff.
for p in packages:
    print(p)

if write:
    # Write results to file.
    filename = ''.join((pkg, '.txt'))
    with open(filename, 'a') as f:
        print(''.join(('Yaourt search for "', pkg, '"\n')), file=f)
        print('To install:', file=f)
        packages_string = ' '.join(packages)
        print(' '.join(('yaourt -Sa', packages_string)), file=f)
        print('\nPackage list:', file=f)
        for p in packages:
            print(p, file=f)
    # Open file.
    call(('xdg-open', filename))

if install:
    # Install packages with yaourt.
    for p in packages:
        print(''.join(('\n\033[1;32m==> ', '\033[1;37m', p,
                       '\033[0m')))
        Popen(['yaourt', '-Sa', '%s' % p]).communicate()

Solution

You've just re-invented the wheel. pacman, packer and yaourt all have the -q flag.

For example:

yaourt -Ssq coreutils

Results:

coreutils
busybox-coreutils
coreutils-git
coreutils-icp
coreutils-selinux
coreutils-static
cv
cv-git
ecp
gnu2busybox-coreutils
gnu2plan9-coreutils
gnu2posix2001-coreutils
gnu2sysv-coreutils
gnu2ucb-coreutils
policycoreutils
selinux-usr-policycoreutils-old
smack-coreutils
xml-coreutils

Comments

[GreenRaccoon23]

Well that's unfortunate haha. I'm not sure how I've never noticed that -q argument before. At least pacsearch -i is less messy than yaourt -Sa $(yaourt -Ssaq), so I still have a use for the script. Opening the results in a text document is helpful too.

[Steve]

@GreenRaccoon23: There's a page on pacman tips in the Arch wiki that's worth a read. If you're after a 'less messy' solution, but still want the convenience of a wrapper, you'd be better off just using a shell function or alias instead. And if you want to open the results in a text document, why not just pipe to vim?

[Steve]

@GreenRaccoon23: Also, pacsearch is already part of core/pacman, so you may want to consider changing the name of your tool.