Egencache

egencache is a tool that rebuilds metadata information for the Portage tree. It is built into Portage and therefore comes installed on every Gentoo system.

Metadata for the Portage tree comes included in Portage tarballs and, in most circumstances, can be re-downloaded by running an. It will not be downloaded when using a CVS or git checkout as the Portage sync method, which is more easily possible using repos.conf.

Installation
Every Gentoo system should have installed. Run a quick test by issuing the the  option as seen in the usage section below.

If usage instructions are not displayed to the terminal there is certainly a problem. It is possible to (re)install Portage by following the Portage installation instructions.

Invocation
Use the /  option to see the capabilities of :

Rebuilding the metadata cache
In order to rebuild the metadata cache on a system issue the following command:

Adjust the number of jobs to be appropriate to each system. The "safe" metric to use with jobs will depend on the processor and system load; if there is no load on the system use the metric of one job per processor thread plus one. In a quad core processor that has two threads per core the equation would result in  being set for jobs (2*4+1). In the example above  jobs are used as the example.

Removal
Simply put: removing Portage is a bad idea. Do not do it.