B.2.5. Freshening

Freshening is similar to upgrading, except that only existent packages are upgraded. Type the following command at a shell prompt:

rpm -Fvh foo-2.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

RPM's freshen option checks the versions of the packages specified on the command line against the versions of packages that have already been installed on your system. When a newer version of an already-installed package is processed by RPM's freshen option, it is upgraded to the newer version. However, RPM's freshen option does not install a package if no previously-installed package of the same name exists. This differs from RPM's upgrade option, as an upgrade does install packages whether or not an older version of the package was already installed.

Freshening works for single packages or package groups. If you have just downloaded a large number of different packages, and you only want to upgrade those packages that are already installed on your system, freshening does the job. Thus, you do not have to delete any unwanted packages from the group that you downloaded before using RPM.

In this case, issue the following with the *.rpm glob:

rpm -Fvh *.rpm

RPM then automatically upgrades only those packages that are already installed.