Thanks, I apologise profusely for requiring things so "bluntly"...I'll get there eventually! (2 weeks isnt long enough to "unlearn" windows "bad habits!!")
Im in the process of these now, is there some way I can check to see if these packages have been installed already?
Or just install them anyway and hope for the best...??? ;)
Is there some other administrator on the machine, who would have gone and installed them without your knowledge?
You can always use the -F option to rpm, since that merely freshens the packages, e.g upgrades only if the packages is installed and is older than the one you are looking to install. It can't do any harm, since it will just do nothing if the package is already installed.
In general, I use rpm -qa | grep -i <some pattern> to see if something is installed.
For instance: rpm -qa | grep rpm on my system yields:
rpm-4.2-1 rpm-build-4.2-1 rpmdb-redhat-9-0.20030313 rpm-devel-4.2-1 rpm-python-4.2-1
Joe
