Table of contents

Introduction

The program pacman is the package manager of the Arch Linux distribution. It should be exclusively used to install, update and remove software on an Arch Linux system.

New Arch Linux users should be able to manage the software on their system in most cases with an open terminal and this article.

Full system update

Use the following command to update all the software on an Arch Linux system. This includes the operating system as well as applications:

sudo pacman -Syu

If this fails because of errors related to signing keys and GPG it can be fixed by running this command:

sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring && sudo pacman -Su

This error can be avoided by updating the system regularly.

One can search for existing packages with this command:

pacman -Ss <keyword>

<keyword> should be replaced by keywords like firefox. Furthermore the package search on the Arch Linux homepage in the upper right corner can be used.

The Arch Linux wiki contains also a long list of applications which is an excellent place to search for needed programs by category.

Package installation

Installing a package is simple:

sudo pacman -S <package>

<package> should be replaced by the lower case package name found with the package search (see above) like firefox or gimp.

If this fails because the packages cannot be retrieved via the HTTP protocol the error can be fixed by updating the whole system first as described above.

Package removal

The recommended command to remove a package is:

sudo pacman -Rs <package>

While R selects removal s is the recursive option. This additionally removes packages which were needed for the selected package to work.

The recursive option is smart enough to leave a dependency on the system if it is needed by another explicitly installed package.

Further documentation

This page is just a little cheat sheet especially targeted at new Arch Linux users. The following references point to the official documentation about pacman:

They should be consulted to get further information and should be trusted more than this page if in conflict with its content.