Everyone uses yum command to install packages on Red Hat/CentOS platforms, but not many people actually care what happens behind the scene.
Did you know that the packages installed by yum and nothing more than rpm files?
Sure, in 90% of the cases you don’t really care .. if it works, well .. it works. But if you want to look inside some rpm files, it is good to actually get the files, not just install them.
One simple tool for this task is yumdownloader.
[root@bubble ~]# yumdownloader htop
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: mirror.team-cymru.org
* epel: mirror.oss.ou.edu
* rpmforge: mirror.team-cymru.org
htop-1.0.2-1.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm | 80 kB 00:00
[root@bubble ~]# ll
total 100
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 81464 Nov 19 2012 htop-1.0.2-1.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
Pretty easy to use, right?
Please note that yumdownloader is not installed by default, but you can get it pretty easily:
yum install yum-utils
