On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 01:26 -0500, Tony Nelson wrote: > At 9:37 PM -0500 1/17/06, Michael D. Berger wrote: > > >[...] > >> Try yum update openoffice* > >> > >> Or if your yum is set to run nightly automatically it may already be > >> updated and not need any new updates. > >> > >> Cheers. > >> > >[...] > >> > >> Seeing the recent announcement for the openoffice update, I typed: > >> > >> yum update openoffice > >> > >> Not much happened, and it said there was nothing to update. > >> Did I do the wrong thing? > >> Thanks for your help. > >> Mike. > >[...] > > [top-posting corrected] > > >The asterisk did the trick. Is there a generality I should > >infer from this, or are there hidden risks? In this specific case, the asterisk was required because the openoffice package names are called "openoffice.org-calc", "openoffice.org-writer" etc. and there is no package just called "openoffice". So a "yum update openoffice" does nothing because there is no such package as "openoffice". With the asterisk, yum will select all the packages whose names start with "openoffice", which then includes the packages you're after. > Yes to both. See "man yum" and "man bash". In general, if you want to > tell yum to wildcard, you should escape the asterisk so that the shell > doesn't manage to expand it first: > > yum update openoffice\* > > Also: > > yum list \*open\* Good advice. If there was a file in the current directory whose name started with "openoffice", e.g. "openoffice.org-core-2.0.1.1-4.1.i386.rpm", then # yum update openoffice* would be expanded by the shell to # yum update openoffice.org-core-2.0.1.1-4.1.i386.rpm before yum got started, and that would cause yum to look for a package (not a file) called openoffice.org-core-2.0.1.1-4.1.i386.rpm, which it wouldn't find. By escaping the asterisk as shown by Tony, the shell doesn't do this and yum gets to expand the wildcard itself, which is the desired effect. Paul.
