How to get a list of installed software on RPM based systems

You might want to do this to know what packages to restore, or to discover the difference between two installations.


In this article, the suggested command is rpm -qa. That is correct, but it has a problem. It will list the package names without the architecture. If you are on an x86_64 system, there may be both x86_64 and i386 packages. If you use the generated list to (re-)install the software you may end up getting both architectures. You would get extra packages or worse, there may be a conflict due to common pathnames in the two architectures.


Therefore we need to also output the architecture with the package name. For this we use the --queryformat option of rpm, or the shorter form --qf.


rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}.%{ARCH}\n' > listofpackages