Determine if a package is provided by an installed packagein Arch Linux

Question

I am trying to script the installation of optional "dependencies" depending on what other packages are installed in an Arch Linux system. I can use pacman -Q to tell me if a package has been installed either directly or as a dependency, but this fails if the package is "installed" via provides in the PKGBUILD. How can I determine if a package that provides a package has been installed? The specific issue I have is I want to install kile if both kdebase-workspace and texlive-core are installed. The issue is that I cannot pick up that the AUR texlive-dummy package is providing texlive-core.

Answer 1

You can use package-query to search packages by their 'provides' property. E.g.:

$ package-query --qprovides 'mplayer=36265' -Q -f "%n"
mplayer-vaapi

will list all installed packages that provides 'mplayer=36265'.