At the risk of some really breathtaking simplification, here's how to do very basic RPM-based software management in one page. A later chapter will cover RPM management in far more detail.

The basic unit of software installation in a number of Linux distributions is the RPM file which typically contains some combination of binary executables, configuration files, documentation files, install and uninstall scripts and possibly more. The rpm command lets you examine, install and remove software an RPM-based chunk at a time.

First, be careful with your use of terminology. One can refer both to a package, like the "zip" software package, and to the RPM file that contains that software, which might be the zip-2.3-14.i386.rpm file. The name of the RPM file makes it clear that this file contains the zip software, version 2.3, build number 14, that has been precompiled for an i386 architecture.

Using the rpm command, you can do basic software management as follows (and note very carefully where you would use just the package name and where you would use the full file name):

# rpm -qa | less                   list all installed packages
# rpm -q zip                       query a single installed package

# rpm -i zip-2.3-14.i386.rpm       install an RPM file
# rpm -ivh zip-2.3-14.i386.rpm     install that file verbosely
 
# rpm -e zip                       remove an installed package
 
# rpm -Uvh zip-2.4-5.i386.rpm      upgrade an installed package
  

As I said, this is a drastic simplification of RPM-based software management. A later section will discuss how to example the contents of an RPM file, how to check dependencies and so on.