Operation Manual
zypper se firefox # simple search for "firefox"
zypper se *fire* # using wildcards
zypper se -d fire # also search in package descriptions and summaries
zypper se -u firefox # only display packages not already installed
To search for packages which provide a special capability, use the command
what-provides. For example, if you would like to know which package provides
the perl module SVN::Core, use the following command:
zypper what-provides 'perl(SVN::Core)'
To query single packages, use info with an exact package name as an argument. It
displays detailed information about a package. To also show what is required/recom-
mended by the package, use the options --requires and --recommends:
zypper info --requires MozillaFirefox
The what-provides package is similar to rpm -q --whatprovides
package, but rpm is only able to query the RPM database (that is the database of all
installed packages). Zypper, on the other hand, will tell you about providers of the ca-
pability from any repository, not only those that are installed.
7.1.6 Conguring Zypper
Zypper now comes with a conguration le, allowing you to permanently change
Zypper's behavior (either system-wide or user-specic). For system-wide changes, edit
/etc/zypp/zypper.conf. For user-specic changes, edit ~/.zypper.conf.
If ~/.zypper.conf does not yet exist, you can use /etc/zypp/zypper.conf
as template: copy it to ~/.zypper.conf and adjust it to your liking. Refer to the
comments in the le for help about the available options.
7.1.7 Troubleshooting
In case you have problems to access packages from congured repositories (for example,
zypper cannot nd a certain package though you know that it exists in one the reposito-
ries), it can help to refresh the repositories with:
zypper refresh
If that does not help, try
zypper refresh -fdb
Managing Software with Command Line Tools 105