pacman/yaourt/Arch Linux: How to get CLI summary of out-of-date packages How can I get an update summary from `pacman` showing up in the command line? It should simply tell me how many packages are out of date, maybe with a few options of sorting (e.g. only kernel/`core` packages) I know that `octopi` gets exactly what I want, but it displays it in the tray, while I want it to be accessible from the command line.

pacman ships with a utility _specifically_ for this use case: `checkupdates`:

> checkupdates --help
> checkupdates (pacman) v5.0.2
>
> Safely print a list of pending updates

This ensures that you are not misguidedly running `Pacman -Sy` to update your local database without simulataneously upgrading any out-of-date packages, thereby (inadvertently) running an unsupported partial upgrade.

To print the results of `checkupdates` to your terminal or statusbar/conky/whatever, you just query the temporary database:


pacman -Qqu --dbpath /tmp/checkup-db-user/


You can then set up a systemd-timer or cron job to refresh this database without worrying that you will break your system.

pacman ships with a variety of helpful utilities, you can see them all with:


pacman -Ql pacman | awk -F/ '/bin/ {print $4}'