Hi, I am looking for a method of getting rid of the hole slew of numbers beind a rpm package name. Hoever I am stuck using awk.
Here is what I am trying to accomplish.

[root@linux RPMS]# ls -R vim* | sort
vim-common-6.3.046-0.40E.7.i386.rpm
vim-enhanced-6.3.046-0.40E.7.i386.rpm
vim-minimal-6.3.046-0.40E.7.i386.rpm
vim-X11-6.3.046-0.40E.7.i386.rpm


Problem: the version number behind every package.

Goal to strip out the 6.2828.i386.rpm from each package.

Attempt 1:

[root@linux RPMS]# ls -R vim* | awk -F- '{ print $1 $2 }'
vimcommon
vimenhanced
vimminimal
vimX11



Problem: How do I preserve the "-" character between the vim packages if I am using it as a delimiter?

Thanks

Package names may have a different number of fields separated by hyphen in their name, so it is not a simple task to extract the name using awk. But you can use the rpm command itself, using the --queryformat option. This let you ask rpm to print only the names of the packages, without version number and architecture. For example if you have some downloaded packages you can try
the format is in C-style, with specific tags like NAME, VERSION, RELEASE, ARCH and so on. To see the whole (long) list of available tags, use

There is no relationship between the character you used as delimiter of the input (FS = Field Separator) and what you use as delimiter for the output (OFS = Output Field Separator). In any case, you can use the printf statement to customize the output at your desire:

Thanks, colucix your solution solved the issue, now if only I could have figured this out on my own!