What's the difference between rpm and yum?

Question

Is there any difference between rpm and yum? I know the recent system prefer yum, but want to know if there is need for rpm also.

Solution 1

Yum is a package manager and rpms are the actual packages.

With yum you can add or remove software. The software itself comes within a rpm.

The package manager allows you to install the software from hosted repositories and it will usually install dependencies as well.

Solution 2

to expand on the Udo's answer, there is the program, "rpm", which manipulates specifically the packages it is asked to manipulate, and there is "yum", which is a more intelligent management system that can find dependencies and download .rpm files even if they're not in the system.

with the "rpm" command, you need to know the exact location of the .rpm package, but with "yum", you just need to know the name of it, and as long as it's available through your repositories list, it will be installed along with its dependencies