» rpm -qa

Discussing a little on #smart yesterday about providing tab completion to smart on the shell (i.e. bash completion for smart install y<tab>), I argued it would be difficult because querying the list of all installed packages from RPM is a pretty slow thing. I stand corrected: Jeff Johnson (aka Mr RPM ;)) reminded me that what is actually slow when doing rpm -qa is computing the hashes, which can be turned off using the following flags: --nosignature --nodigest And indeed, the following command is a lot faster (especially when the RPM database files are not cached in memory): rpm -qa --nosignature --nodigest Too long to type ? cat <EOF >>/usr/local/bin/rpmqa #!/bin/sh exec rpm -qa --nosignature --nodigest "$@" EOF chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/rpmqa rpmqa smart\*