One of the most commonly asked questions in the CentOS forums is concerned with 3rd party repositories. In addition to referring to the Repositories wiki article, we need to make sure people use the yum priorities plugin appropriately.

Often times, we want to know how they set up the priority scores but there is no easy way to display them. yum repolist all does not include this info. A forum helper jlehtone posted a one-liner that does just that:

cat /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo | sed -n -e "/^\[/h; /priority *=/{ G; s/\n/ /; s/ity=/ity = /; p }"  | sort -k3n

The output may look like this:

priority = 10 [base]
priority = 10 [updates]
priority = 30 [extras]
priority = 50 [centosplus]
priority = 60 [c5-testing]
priority = 70 [rpmforge]
priority = 75 [kbs-CentOS-Testing]
priority = 90 [kbs-CentOS-Misc-Testing]
priority = 94 [epel]

Almost immediately after the above post, Alan the perfectionist, a cat person himself, opposed the use of over-working cats and came up with his version of the one-liner:

sed -n -e "/^\[/h; /priority *=/{ G; s/\n/ /; s/ity=/ity = /; p }" /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo | sort -k3n

Personally … I want to see the cats working for the community … 😀