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, which are provided through the package.

Quick Reference
Install the q applets:

To see the available applets with a short description of their function, use q --help :

Before using the applets, initialize the cache first:

Small portage utilities
The package 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 they do not offer the same functionality. It does not consider eclasses and does not provide tools like revdep-rebuild or glsa-check.

The complete list of applications that are provided by can be listed 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
The qfile command finds the package to which a file belongs:

Verifying package integrity
To check the MD5 sums or modification times of the files installed by some package, use the qcheck application:

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

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

Listing files that belong to an ebuild
The qlist command gives a list of all files that belong to an ebuild.

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

Finding package sizes
To show the size of a package, use the qsize application:

Searching the Portage tree
One of the most powerful tools of is qsearch. This tool allows to search the Portage tree much faster than using the emerge -s command.

Here are some examples of its usage:

The homepage of packages can be queried using the -H option:

In another example, let's look for a jabber client:

Extracting information from emerge logs
There is also a tool that allows to extract useful information from the file. It's called qlop and it can be useful when package compilation times need to be estimated or to compare build times with other systems. It also allows to check what's compiling at the moment and how long it will probably take - which is handy when working in the console and don't have any other means to check it.

To see how long a build usually takes:

To see what is emerging at the moment and how long the process has been running already: