List RPM packages sorted by install date

I had to confirm the most recently installed packages on a Red Hat system recently, and was plesantly surprised that this is a very easy task in Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS Linux systems.

RPM packages sorted by install date

All you need is the –last option for the rpm command.

Here’s how it looks on a CentOS 7.4 server that hasn’t been updated in a month:

root@centos74:~ # rpm -qa --last | more
time-1.7-45.el7.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
ssmtp-2.64-14.el7.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
spax-1.5.2-13.el7.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
redhat-lsb-submod-security-4.1-27.el7.centos.1.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
redhat-lsb-core-4.1-27.el7.centos.1.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
psmisc-22.20-15.el7.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
patch-2.7.1-10.el7_5.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
mailx-12.5-19.el7.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
ed-1.9-4.el7.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
cups-client-1.6.3-35.el7.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
bc-1.06.95-13.el7.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
at-3.1.13-24.el7.x86_64 Mon 10 Dec 2018 12:18:13 GMT
mariadb-5.5.60-1.el7_5.x86_64 Wed 12 Sep 2018 22:22:32 IST
mariadb-libs-5.5.60-1.el7_5.x86_64 Wed 12 Sep 2018 22:22:31 IST
xorg-x11-font-utils-7.5-20.el7.x86_64 Fri 17 Aug 2018 07:44:00 IST
xorg-x11-fonts-Type1-7.5-9.el7.noarch Fri 17 Aug 2018 07:44:00 IST
ttmkfdir-3.0.9-42.el7.x86_64 Fri 17 Aug 2018 07:44:00 IST
libXfont-1.5.2-1.el7.x86_64 Fri 17 Aug 2018 07:44:00 IST
libfontenc-1.1.3-3.el7.x86_64 Fri 17 Aug 2018 07:43:59 IST
xorg-x11-server-utils-7.7-20.el7.x86_64 Thu 16 Aug 2018 18:18:48 IST
libXxf86misc-1.0.3-7.1.el7.x86_64 Thu 16 Aug 2018 18:18:48 IST
libXrandr-1.5.1-2.el7.x86_64 Thu 16 Aug 2018 18:18:48 IST
libXi-1.7.9-1.el7.x86_64 Thu 16 Aug 2018 18:18:48 IST

After I run yum update though, you can run the same command and see that a lot of packages have been updated and showing 03 Fed 2019 as their install date:

root@centos74:~ # rpm -qa --last | more
gcc-c++-4.8.5-36.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:56 GMT
unzip-6.0-19.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:55 GMT
libstdc++-devel-4.8.5-36.el7.i686 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:55 GMT
libstdc++-4.8.5-36.el7.i686 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:55 GMT
dialog-1.2-5.20130523.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:55 GMT
datadog-agent-6.9.0-1.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:54 GMT
p7zip-16.02-10.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:48 GMT
libicu-50.1.2-17.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:48 GMT
iprutils-2.4.16.1-1.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:48 GMT
xorg-x11-font-utils-7.5-21.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:47 GMT
perl-Pod-Escapes-1.04-294.el7_6.noarch Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:47 GMT
libXfont-1.5.4-1.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:47 GMT
libstdc++-devel-4.8.5-36.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:47 GMT
gdisk-0.8.10-2.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:47 GMT
yum-utils-1.1.31-50.el7.noarch Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:46 GMT
xfsprogs-4.5.0-18.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:46 GMT
wget-1.14-18.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:46 GMT
sudo-1.8.23-3.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:46 GMT
python-urllib3-1.10.2-5.el7.noarch Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:46 GMT
python2-psutil-2.2.1-4.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:46 GMT
pam_ssh_agent_auth-0.10.3-2.16.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:46 GMT
man-db-2.6.3-11.el7.x86_64 Sun 03 Feb 2019 09:14:46 GMT

See Also

• RPM package manager
• YUM package manager
• Red Hat Linux