Gentoo Commands

[edit] Common commands for Gentoo Linux

rc-config rc-status rc-update

emerge
emerge is the definitive command-line interface to the Portage system. It is primarily used for installing packages, and emerge can automatically handle any dependencies that the desired package has. emerge can also update the portage tree, making new and updated packages available. emerge gracefully handles updating installed packages to newer releases as well. It handles both source and binary packages, and it can be used to create binary packages for distribution.

ebuild
It allows for direct action upon an ebuild with specific subcommands or groups of commands to perform in a specific ebuild's context and functions. Accepting an ebuild script and one or more commands as arguments, the ebuild program parses the ebuild script and execute the specified commands.

env-update
Env-update reads the files in /etc/env.d and automatically generates /etc/profile.env and /etc/ld.so.conf.

dispatch-conf
dispatch-conf is designed to be run after merging new packages in order to see if there are updates to the configuration files.

etc-update
Etc-Update is supposed to be run after merging a new package to see if there are updates to the configuration files.

quickpkg
quickpkg can be utilized to quickly create a package for portage by utilizing the files already on your filesystem.

repoman
Gentoo's program to enforce a minimal level of quality assurance in packages added to the portage tree

emerge-webrsync
Installs a Portage snapshot. Usually useful in new installations instead of emerge --sync'ing.

Small utility for searching ebuilds with indexing for fast results

eix
A set of utilities for searching, diffing and updating a binary cache of your local portage-trees

eix-sync
eix-sync runs emerge --sync and update-eix, it then compares the new cache with the old cache using diff-eix.

Replacement for 'emerge --search' with search-index

CLI use flags and keyword editor, for system wide or /etc/portage files

flagedit
flagedit allows you to edit the use flags or the keywords for a particular ebuild, or for the whole system.

A nice emerge.log parser

Collection of administration scripts for Gentoo

equery
A flexible utility which may display various information about packages, such as the files they own, their USE flags, the md5sum of each file owned by a given package, and many other things.

etcat
etcat tries to complement the existing portage related tools but geared specifically for the power user. It enables users and developers to quickly find out information on particular packages without resorting to manually poking the portage tree and portage database. [REMOVED -- See discussion at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-419444-highlight-etcat.html]

revdep-rebuild
Reverse dependency rebuilder. Always run this after you upgrade or unmerge shared libraries. It re-emerges the applications that are broken by the ABI change or the removed library.