With the new virtualbox update I had to obtain virtualbox version in a script (and of course, virtualbox binary doesn't have a sane --version parameter...). Anyway, its pretty simple to pacman -Qi virtualbox | grep -e "^Version" | awk '{print $3}' | sed 's|-.||' Perhaps it may be nice to have a pacman flag to obtain just the version string. I'll file a feature request, but before that anyone has an comments on why it would be useless or a bad idea?