Suppose, not hypothetically, that you have an old Fedora system with a lot of packages installed and a 70 GByte root filesystem, which is now awkwardly small during system upgrades and so on. You would like to find out which of your roughly 7,500 packages are contributing the most to your space usage.

(The real solution is to move to a bigger pair of NVMe drives, but that involves various yak shaving and you want to upgrade to Fedora 43 today .)

The simple version of 'how big are your RPMs' is to ask rpm for the ordinary (binary) size of all of your installed binary RPMs:

rpm -qa --qf '%{SIZE:humaniec} %{N}-%{V}-%{R}.%{ARCH}\n' | sort -hr

This will tell you interesting things, like how the Fedora 43 version of wine-core-11.0-2.fc43.x86_64 is 1.3 GBytes all by itself. However, it's not necessarily the full answer for what is using up your disk space, because a single (source) package can create many binary packages (often these mostly get installed together and it's hard to split them apart in any useful way). For instance, on my work machine with the 70 GByte root partition, there are 263 'texlive' packages and 101 'perl' packages (and 66 'qemu' packages).

Often a more useful way to break down packages is by the total installed size for a particular source package. This is where I turn to my ' sumup ' script, and also to ' numfmt ' , to get the following:

rpm -qa --qf '%{SIZE} %{SOURCERPM} %{N}-%{V}-%{R}.%{ARCH}\n' |
  sumup 2 1 | numfmt --format '%8.1f' --to iec 

This may reveal surprises that you didn't know. For example, my home desktop has 847 MBytes of packages derived from 'rocm-compilersupport', despite my home machine having no AMD GPU (it uses the integrated Intel GPU). These appear to be present as dependencies of Blender (based on what 'dnf remove' told me it wanted to do).

(It can also tell you that lots of binary packages derived from a single source package don't necessarily result in a lot of disk space being consumed. All of those 263 texlive packages amount to 289 Mbytes, and those 101 Perl packages, 43 Mbytes.)

I preserved the binary name, version, release, and architecture in the second command, even though it's not used, so that I can later copy and paste the ' rpm ' command snippet to grep its output to find out all of the binary packages derived from a source package of interest. A smart approach to this would be to split this up into two commands:

rpm -qa --qf '%{SIZE} %{SOURCERPM} %{N}-%{V}-%{R}.%{ARCH}\n' >/tmp/foo
sumup 2 1 </tmp/foo | numfmt --format '%8.1f' --to iec

Putting the initial output in a file is useful because 'rpm -qa --qf ...' is not necessarily the fastest thing in the world, at least if you're asking it for the 'size' of RPMs. With the initial output saved in a file, I can just grep the file, which is going to be very fast.

PS: If your install of Fedora has been around for a while, this may also reveal various obsolete packages. I have llvm-libs packages that seem to go all the way back to Fedora 32. I probably don't need those any more, or at least I hope I don't. But cleaning up old RPMs from past Fedora releases is its own subject and doesn't at all fit in the margins of this entry.