Q applets

The q applets are a collection of small and fast portage helper tools written in C. This guide covers some common uses of these helper tools, also known as the package.

Quick Reference
You can install them as usual with:

To see the available applets with a short description of their function, do:

You may need to initialize the cache as root first:

Introduction
portage-utils is a collection of very fast utilities written in C, which are meant to offer a faster but more limited alternative to their counterparts. Please note that portage-utils is not meant to replace gentoolkit. Its utilities are much more efficient than the equivalent ones from gentoolkit and might be better suited to be used in scripts that need to call Portage repeatedly, but portage-utils does not offer the same functionality. It does not consider eclasses and does not provide tools like revdep-rebuild or glsa-check.

More information about gentoolkit can be found in the Gentoolkit guide.

You can view the complete list of applications found in by typing man q or q --help. Please read the man page for each utility described, as this guide is only meant to be a short reference for the most useful functions and does not include all the information about each application.

How to find a package to which a file belongs
finds the package to which a file belongs:

Verifying package integrity
If you want to check MD5 sums or mtimes of the files installed by some package, you can do it using the  application:

Of course, all the files which were changed after installation will be reported here. If the application reports configuration files which you have manually edited after installation, there's nothing to worry about.

Listing packages which depend on some package
Of course there's also an application which allows you to list all the packages which depend on some package. This is done using. Use the  flag to show all the DEPEND, RDEPEND, and PDEPEND information for a package.

Listing files that belong to an ebuild
gives you a list of all files that belong to an ebuild.

Looking for packages that use some USE flag
This is done with, which must be run as root. It may take some time to first create/update the ebuild cache.

Finding package sizes
This is done with  application and is as simple as:

Searching the Portage tree
One of the most powerful tools of  is. This tool allows you to search your Portage tree much faster than default.

Here are some examples of its usage:

I want to thank the guy who made them. What's his homepage?:

I need a jabber client and I need it now:

Extracting information from emerge logs
There is also a tool that allows you to extract useful information from your file. It's called  and it can be useful when you want to estimate package compilation times or compare with your friends whose computer compiles faster. It also allows you to check what's compiling at the moment and how long it will take - which is handy when you're working in the console and don't have any other means to check it.

I'm starting to emerge perl and I want an estimate on how long it usually takes:

Now let's see what's emerging at the moment:

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following authors and editors for their contributions to this guide:


 * Åukasz Damentko
 * Joshua Saddler
 * Marcelo Góes