Pacman is a package management utility that tracks installed packages on a Linux system. It features dependency support, package groups, install and uninstall scripts, and the ability to sync your local machine with a remote repository to automatically upgrade packages. Pacman packages are a zipped tar format.

Since version 3.0.0, pacman has been the front-end to libalpm(3), the “Arch Linux Package Management” library. This library allows alternative front-ends to be written (for instance, a GUI front-end).

Invoking pacman involves specifying an operation with any potential options and targets to operate on. A target is usually a package name, file name, URL, or a search string. Targets can be provided as command line arguments. Additionally, if stdin is not from a terminal and a single hyphen (-) is passed as an argument, targets will be read from stdin.