About this reference

This is an independent reference for pacman, the package manager of Arch Linux. It is written from behaviour documented in the pacman(8) manual page, which you can read on any machine that has pacman installed.

man pacman

What this site is not

• It is not part of the Arch Linux project, the ArchWiki, or the group that develops pacman, and it is not connected to them in any way. The authoritative sources are the ArchWiki page on pacman and the pacman(8) manual page, and where this site disagrees with either of them, they are right.
• It is not about the arcade video game whose name resembles this domain.
• It is not a distribution, a download site, or a place to get packages. It describes commands; the packages come from your own configured repositories.

How to read it

• Check a flag letter before you rely on it. Run pacman -<operation> --help and look for the letter in that operation's own list. Where a page here disagrees with it, the manual page is right and the page here is wrong.
• Expect shapes, not transcripts. Command output is written with placeholders such as <version>, because a real transcript would carry version numbers that are wrong on your own machine.
• Read a danger level as a starting point, not a verdict. Before running something that removes or overwrites, run the same line with -p under -S, -R or -U and read the list it prints before you run it for real.

How to check any of it

Two commands, both already on your machine: