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A. R. Diederich
Asked: 2016-08-28 08:10:17 +0800 CST

How to install packages from list with zypper?

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End state. I want to reformat my / partition, reinstall opensuse tumbleweed, and have the same packages installed then as now.

Problem. I made what appears to be a poor choice, formatting the root filesystem as btrfs. The 20 GB I had for it was plenty previously with, say, ext3, but I can't keep up with the snapshot management with snapper with the large number of updates tumbleweed does.

Partial success. I can export my repository list with sudo zypper lr -u --export repo.list, and add that back to a fresh install with sudo zypper addrepo repo.list. I can export a list of installed pakcages with sudo zypper search --installed-only > installed.packages or rpm -qa | sort.

But I don't know how to install packages from a list, or generate a list of packages that can be used by opensuse at distribution install time.

Edit: autoyast may be the way to go, but is more heavyweight than I was looking for.

opensuse autoyast zypper

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Use --queryformat to list package names without version

    rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME}\n" > installed_pkgs.txt

    To install, pipe content of the file to xargs

    cat installed_pkgs.txt | xargs sudo zypper install
    • 3

  2. It might be slow, but you can use this bash script:

    IFS=$'\n'

for package in `cat installed.packages`; do
    zypper install $package
done
    • 1