How To Install refer on CentOS 8

One-liner Install Command

If you are only interested in the installation command, here is a quick answer for you:

sudo yum makecache && sudo yum -y install groff

sudo dnf makecache && sudo dnf -y install groff

But if you are interested in the details with step-by-step instructions, the following information will be helpful.

What is refer and How to Install It?

First things first, you will need access to a server or computer running CentOS 8. This guide was written specifically with a server running CentOS 8 in mind, although it should also work on older, supported versions of the operating system.

Also, make sure you are running a regular, non-root user with sudo privileges configured on your server. When you have an account available, log in as your non-root user to begin.

There are several ways to install refer on CentOS 8. You can use (links are clickable):

In the following sections, we will describe each method in detail. You can choose one of them or refer to the recommended one.

Install refer on CentOS 8 using dnf

First, update dnf packages database with dnf by running the next command:

sudo dnf makecache --refresh

After updating database, You can install refer using dnf by running the following command:

sudo dnf -y install groff

Install refer on CentOS 8 using yum

Because refer is available in CentOS 8’s default repositories, it is possible to install it from these repositories using the yum packaging system.

To begin, update local packages database with yum using the following command.

sudo yum makecache --refresh

Now can install refer package on your server/computer by running the following command:

sudo yum -y install groff

How to upgrade (update) a single package refer using yum?

To update all the packages available on the system:

yum update

If you want to update a specific package like refer in this example you should use the following command:

yum update groff

To downgrade a package to an earlier version:

yum downgrade groff

How to Upgrade refer on CentOS 8 with dnf?

When you run the dnf update, all system packages with available updates are updated. However, if you want to upgrade a single package, then you would have to pass the package name as the argument to the dnf update command.

dnf update groff

How To remove refer from CentOS 8

To uninstall only the refer package you can execute the following command:

sudo dnf remove groff

Extra info and code examples

This package contains optional components of the GNU troff text-formatting system. The core package, groff-base, contains the traditional tools like troff, nroff, tbl, eqn, and pic. This package contains additional devices and drivers for output to DVI, HTML (when recommended packages are installed - see below), PDF, HP LaserJet printers, and Canon CAPSL LBP-4 and LBP-8 printers. The X75, X75-12, X100, and X100-12 devices, which allow groff output to be conveniently viewed on an X display using the standard X11 fonts, are now included here. They were previously in a separate package, groff-x11. Besides these, the groff package contains man pages describing the language and its macro sets, info documentation, and a number of supplementary programs: - gxditview, which is used to display the output of the X* devices, and can also be used to view PostScript output from groff; - grn, a preprocessor for pictures in the 'gremlin' format; - tfmtodit, which creates font files for use with 'groff -Tdvi'; - hpftodit, which creates font files for use with 'groff -Tlj4'; - afmtodit, which creates font files for use with 'groff -Tps'; - refer, which preprocesses bibliographic references for use with groff; - indxbib, which creates inverted indices for bibliographic databases used by 'refer'; - lkbib and lookbib, which search bibliographic databases; - addftinfo, which adds metric information to troff font files for use with groff; - pfbtops, which translates a PostScript font in .pfb format to ASCII for use with groff; - mmroff, a simple groff preprocessor which expands references in mm; - pic2graph, which converts PIC diagrams into cropped image files; - eqn2graph, which converts EQN equations into cropped image files; - pdfmom, which runs 'groff -mom' to produce PDFs. All the standard macro packages are supported. Some facilities only work if certain recommended packages are installed: - ghostscript, netpbm, psutils: required for HTML output; - imagemagick: required for the pic2graph and eqn2graph programs; - libpaper1: paper size detection in dvi, lbp, lj4, and ps devices (falls back to a4 if not installed); - perl: required for PDF output and for the chem preprocessor.

Conclusion

You now have a full guide on how to install refer using dnf and yum package managers. Also, we showed how to update manually as a single package and different ways to uninstall the refer from CentOS 8.

See also: