You've noticed by now that Pacman's default behavior is to give you messages when performing certain operations like downloading files. To control what messages you see, use the -v switch. For example, if you do
% pacman -v http tar -get BU:Pythonyou will see only http and tar related messages during the installation. To see a complete list of such options, do
% pacman -v helpEach time you use a switch with options like -v, -d, -ask, etc., the options that you choose are saved as defaults until you change them. To see what the current defaults are, do
% pacman -defYou can also use
% pacman -v noneto turn off all of the options for such command line switches.
Besides general verbosity, there is also a useful set of display options associated just with the -l and -lc commands. For example, suppose you want to see the version numbers of all packages in the BU cache. You do this with
% pacman -d version -lc BUSimilarly, -d help gives a complete list of choices.
If you are debugging some Pacman code or if you want to install cautiously, you might want to step through an installation. Pacman 3 let's you do this using the -ask command line switch. For example, make a new installation using
% pacman -ask action -get BU:PythonThe action option asks your permission before performing any action defined in the Pacman language. As usual, you can get a list of options for -ask by doing % pacman -ask help. When debugging, cautious or just curious, it is often useful to use
% pacman -ask shell -installThis causes Pacman to stop and ask permission before executing any shell command defined in the language. A more verbose approach is to do
% pacman -ask shell-all -installThis will also ask permission whenever Pacman needs to execute a shell command, even for internal reasons.