December 2018
Beginner
826 pages
22h 54m
English
Content preview from Linux Administration Cookbook
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How it works...
What you're effectively doing (in both cases) is querying the package database on your system.
On your CentOS system, RPM and YUM are both looking inside /var/lib/rpm in order to determine the state of your system.
Similarly, on your Debian system, your package state is held within /var/lib/dpkg.
It is advisable to not mess with these folders outside of the applications that are used to manage them, as modifying the nature of the packages installed on your system (outside of a package manager) can cause odd, and sometimes destructive, behavior.