Q applets/en

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
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
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  is not meant to replace. Its utilities are much more efficient than the equivalent ones from  and might be better suited to be used in scripts that need to call Portage repeatedly, but   does not offer the same functionalities. It does not consider eclasses at all and does not provide tools like  and.

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
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 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
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
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.

To see how long a build usually takes:

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