How can I find out, whether a specific package is already installed in Arch Linux

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You should use Pacman, the package manager of Arch Linux.

You want to use the -Q operation to query the installed local package database and the -i option to get information on the package.

This gives you

pacman -Qi <packageName>

You can then use the exit code to determine if the packages existes on the system or not (0 the package exists, 1 it doesn’t)

The usage of -i rather than -s ensures you will check for exactly that package and not for the presence of a a package containing the package name in its name.

For example if I search for chromium (the web browser) on a system where only chromium-bsu (the game) is installed,

# This exits with 1 because chromium is not installed
pacman -Qi chromium 
# This exits with 0 because chromium-bsu is installed
pacman -Qs chromium

As Random Citizen pointed out, you certainly want to redirect any output to /dev/null if you are writing a script and don’t want Pacman to pollute your output: 

pacman -Qi <packageName> > /dev/null

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