Unbeknownst to many, rpm supports random printf() style query strings via the –qf option. List all available tags with “rpm –querytags” and display them with “rpm -q –qf ‘%{QUERYVARIABLE}’. On some versions of rpm, you need to place multiple variables inside brackets ( [] ) to display them all properly.

Use the ARCH and NAME tags along with sort to display a list of all packages and the architecture they were built for:

$ rpm -qa --qf '[%{ARCH} %{NAME}\n]' | sort

i386 zip
i386 zlib
i686 glibc
i686 kernel
i686 kernel-smp
i686 openssl
noarch basesystem
noarch htmlview
noarch hwdata
noarch man-pages
...

Say you want to look at the licenses of every package installed on your system except gpl and bsd code. Rpm makes this very easy

$ rpm -qa --qf '[%{LICENSE} %{NAME}\n]' | egrep -v '(GPL|BSD)'
public domain setup
public domain basesystem
distributable ncurses
freeware vim-minimal
Freely Distributable cyrus-sasl
XFree86 redhat-menus
distributable symlinks
distributable zip
Artistic perl-RPM2
distributable perl-XML-Encoding
Public Domain expect
Artistic perl-XML-Simple
...

A fairly complex example script showing the power to rpm querystrings and how they can be useful in the real world is available here under the terms of the GNU GPLv2. It querys the rpm database using the verify function (-V). It shows you files that have changed permissions or ownership and optionally allows you to fix them.