yum Command: Tutorial & Examples

Install, remove, and manage software packages on Red Hat-based systems

The yum command is a command-line utility used to manage software packages on systems that use the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) package management system. It is commonly used on systems that run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and other distributions that are based on these systems. The basic syntax of the command is yum [options] [command] [package].

The most common use of yum is to install, update, and remove software packages. For example, the command yum install package-name will install the package with the specified name, and the command yum update package-name will update the package to the latest version. Similarly, yum remove package-name will remove the package from the system.

yum also provides several other commands for managing packages, such as check-update which checks if new versions of packages are available, list which lists all installed packages, and info which shows information about a specific package.

yum also has a feature called "dependency management", this means that when a package is installed, yum automatically installs any other packages that the package depends on. And when a package is removed, yum automatically removes any other packages that are no longer needed.

yum connects to various package repositories over the internet to download and update the packages, these repositories can be configured and added using the yum-config-manager command.