What is a program I can install using RPM?
January 7, 2010 10:03 AM   Subscribe

I need to install a small program on a RHEL box - it doesn't matter what the program is or does, as long as it is installed using RPM.

I need to be able to install a program using RPM, see that it's there, and then uninstall it. (Doing some testing.) I'd like to grab a small, stable program to do this with - can you recommend one? I really don't care to build or compile anything myself. I also don't care what it does, but bonus points if I get to learn about a cool piece of software as well. :) I'm on RHEL 5.3.

Thank you!
posted by warble to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I suggest one of the following:

- bc (interactive calculator)

- fetchmail (e-mail retriever)

- screen (VT manager)

Each is simple has little to no dependency and provides a single command (whose name is the same as the package name).
posted by knz at 10:18 AM on January 7, 2010 [1 favorite]


@knz: Pretty sure all three of those are in the RHEL base install.

This is a suprisingly difficult question to answer, as most of the software I can think of that provides an rpm and isn't in a respository already is fairly large or dependency heavy... Skype, maybe?
posted by word_virus at 1:45 PM on January 7, 2010


I suggest cowsay, as I'm fairly confident you won't find it in the RH base install.
posted by Mike1024 at 1:53 PM on January 7, 2010


s3cmd? I don't believe that's in a standard repository, but the RPMs are available here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/s3tools/files/s3cmd/#files

The main page for the program is here:

http://s3tools.org/s3cmd

Basically, it's a command line tool to manage Amazon S3 buckets, for your cloud storage needs. Yes, it's a cool tool, very nice for scripting, useful to know about. Use it to back up your data to S3.
posted by chengjih at 3:48 PM on January 7, 2010


How about subversion? I know that's in the main repos, and shouldn't be in by default. Bonus points: check important server configuration into SVN for reproducable testing environments.

Or perhaps the neat xmlstarlet, which you can use to build unix pipes & filters to process XML instead of line seperated text.
posted by pwnguin at 10:25 PM on January 7, 2010


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