Parse an RPM name into its components

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You don’t need to do any of this; RPM has a query format argument which will let you specify exactly the data you want to receive. It will even output without line endings if you don’t specify them.

For instance:

rpm --queryformat "%{NAME} %{VERSION} %{RELEASE} %{ARCH}" -q coreutils
rpm --queryformat "The version of %{NAME} is %{VERSION}\n" -q coreutils

rpm --queryformat "%{NAME} %{VERSION} %{RELEASE} %{ARCH}" -qp file.rpm

The complete list of variables you can use can be obtained with:

rpm --querytags

Note that in the case of RELEASE, output like 84.el6 is normal and expected, since this is actually how RPM packages are versioned when packaged by or for a distribution.

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