On Red Hat based Linux systems, such as CentOS, the most common way to install software and applications is to use the package manager Yum.

The standard command line options should be familiar to anyone with even basic sysadmin experience, but a lot of people are not aware that Yum actually has it’s own shell environment.

If you are just running a single command it’s probably not worth logging into the Yum shell, but if you have multiple commands – or groups of commands to run – it can be simpler to use the shell environment. To load the Yum shell type the following:

yum shell

Which will load the shell and display a prompt like this:

Setting up Yum Shell

>

From this prompt, you can run the normal Yum commands (install, remove, etc), but without the need to evoke the yum command each time. So, for example, instead of typing:

yum install php

From the shell, you would simply type:

install php

You can exit the shell by typing either ‘exit’ or ‘quit’. For more information load the manual page from the command line by typing:

man yum-shell