Daenyth/pkgtools — Issue #40: Do we still need 'whoneeds'?
Author: qwerty007
Created: 2011-12-08 17:05:23+00:00
State: open

pactree can print reverse dependency tree since pacman 3.4: http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/tree/NEWS?id=v3.4.0

comm -12 <(pactree -lru $1|sort) <(pacman -Qqe|sort) | grep -v $1
is much faster than 'whoneeds $1' for bigger dep trees: 0.15 sec v. 10 sec. for 'whoneeds zlib' on my system (Pentium 4 @ 2 GHz).
The difference is much less pronounced when listing a small dep tree: 'whoneeds gcc' runs 0.3 sec and returns just 3 packages.

'whoneeds' prints 'Packages that depend on [$1]' as the first line of output, the one-liner I came up with does not.