Yum

Yum is a package manager used to manage RPM packages. It's used in pretty much all Linux distros based around the RPM package format, and is especially notable for being used in Red Hat distributions as well as in Fedora.

It also fucking sucks. Go figure.

Name

Yum means Yellowdog updater, modified. There used to be a yup tool, which stood for yellowdog updater. Yum is a complete rewrite of yup.

Usage

Example output of the yum install command

Like most package managers, yum is quite simple to use. It requires root privileges in order to install and remove packages.

Installing packages

To install a package, issue:

# yum install <package>

Uninstalling packages

To remove a package from the system, issue:

# yum remove <package>

Updates

Yum supports updating individual packages or the entire system at once.

Full system update

To update all the packages on the system, issue:

# yum update

Sometimes, yum will fail to resolve dependencies for various reasons. You can use the --skip-broken option to skip packages whose dependencies could not be resolved:

# yum update --skip-broken

Individual package update

To update an individual package, simply pass its name as the argument:

# yum update <package>

Searching for packages

You can search the remote repository for a package:

# yum search <string>