Querying Package Status in Linux Systems

I am interested in querying the status of packages on Linux systems. Of course, you can query the status using a number of GUI applications, such as, the "Synaptic Package Manager" on Ubuntu Linux and "GNOME Software" on Federa Linux. However, I am more interested a command line approach.

For Linux systems using APT, such as, Ubuntu Linux, we can use the utilities that comes with APT, for instance, use dpkg-query, as pointed out in this post. In addition, this post gives a few more elaborated queries.

Here are a few examples.

• To query if a package is installed, i.e, to report status of specified package,
  
  

  
  $ dpkg-query -s gnome-shell
  dpkg-query: package 'gnome-shell' is not installed and no information is available
  ......
  

  
  

  
  $ dpkg -s gnome-session-flashback
  Package: gnome-session-flashback
  Status: install ok installed
  ......

• To List packages matching given pattern,
  

  
  $ dpkg-query -l gnome-shell
  Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
  | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
  |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
  ||/ Name           Version      Architecture Description
  +++-==============-============-============-=================================
  un  gnome-shell    <none>       <none>       (no description available)
  

  
  $ dpkg-query -l gnome-session-flashback
  Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
  | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
  |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
  ||/ Name           Version      Architecture Description
  +++-==============-============-============-=================================
  ii  gnome-session- 1:3.8.0-1ubu all          GNOME Session Manager - GNOME Fla
  

  
  $ dpkg-query -l gnome*
  Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
  | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
  |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
  ||/ Name           Version      Architecture Description
  +++-==============-============-============-=================================
  un  gnome          <none>       <none>       (no description available)
  ii  gnome-accessib 3.10.0-1ubun all          Accessibility themes for the GNOM
  ii  gnome-applets  3.5.92-0ubun i386         Various applets for the GNOME pan
  ......
  

For Linux systems using RPM, such as, Fedora Linux, we can use yum and rpm. These two pages, on yum and on rpm respectively provide a few good examples of the two.