So, you’ve heard about the versatile port scanning tool called nmap and want to install it in Fedora Linux. The only problem is, you don’t know if it has been pre-packaged and is available as an rpm binary. No worries, all you need to do is search for using yum.

Use the yum search command.

yum search nmap

Based on its output, you know there are packages available, and all you need to do is yum install nmap

[raja@atreides ~]$ yum search nmap
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit
================================ Matched: nmap =================================
nmap.i586 : Network exploration tool and security scanner
nmap-frontend.i586 : the GTK+ frontend for nmap
onesixtyone.i586 : An efficient SNMP scanner
perl-Nmap-Parser.noarch : Parse nmap scan data with perl
psad.i586 : Port Scan Attack Detector (psad) watches for suspect traffic

Or, you might know that its called nmap, and want to search through you yum repositories to find if any of the available rpms have a file called nmap. To do that, use the yum provides */ command. e.g.

yum provides */nmap

[raja@atreides ~]$ yum provides */nmap
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit
2:nmap-4.76-4.fc11.i586 : Network exploration tool and security scanner
Repo        : fedora
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/share/nmap
Filename    : /usr/bin/nmap

From this, you know that the nmap-4.76-4.fc11.i586 rpm contains these files, and by installing it, you get nmap.