How do I use RPM?

This was generously contributed by EmacsDctr, and slightly edited by an anonymous contributor and strix. We would like to add one very important note: man rpm

RPM is the Red Hat Package Manager or RPM for short. RPM is a very useful way of installing and maintaining Linux programs. It also makes your Linux box easier to maintain. First, let me state some of the philosophy behind RPM. One design goal was to allow the use of "pristine" sources. With RPM, you have the pristine sources along with a patch that we used to compile from. This is a big advantage. Why? Several reasons. For one, if a new version of a program comes out, you don't necessarily have to start from scratch to get it to compile under RHL. You can look at the patch to see what you might need to do. All the compile-in defaults are easily visible this way.

RPM is also designed to have powerful querying options. You can do searches through your entire database for packages or just certain files. You can also easily find out what package a file belongs to and where it came from. The RPM files themselves are compressed archives, but you can query individual packages easily and quickly because of a custom binary header added to the package with everything you could possibly need to know contained in uncompressed form. This allows for fast querying.

Another powerful feature is the ability to verify packages. If you are worried that you deleted an important file for some package, just verify it. You will be notified of any anomalies. At that point, you can reinstall the package if necessary. Any config files that you had are preserved as well.