I am going to guess by your question that you are new to Linux, or at
least SUSE Linux and probably package management systems like RPM. That
may not all be true, but it’s a guess, and one I’m using to provide a
reply that is probably a bit more verbose than you may want, but without
knowing what you know, I need to provide more answer than you may need.
First, Yast is a setup tool (Yet Another Setup Tool) and as such does a
lot of things, but it does not directly handle package management, whether
for the ‘alien’ package or anything else. Instead it is coded to do
things like call ‘zypper’ or ‘rpm’ on the backend, which are the tools
that do the real work with packages.
RPM is the package management system that actually manages the files in
the filesystem, first in the form of RPM files (packages, which are files
ending in .rpm tyipcally), and later in their extracted forms in the RPM
databases, and actual binaries/configurations/etc. in the filesystem after
the packages are installed via the ‘rpm’ command.
zypper is a wrapper of sorts around ‘rpm’ which also manages repositories,
which are stores of RPM packages for a particular purpose, whether that’s
openSUSE Leap 42.2, or openSUSE Tumbleweed, or SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server (SLES) 12 SP3, or maybe something specific like SAP code to run on
top of SLES, or the Desktop extension to provide desktop tools for the
same. Repositories can be created by anybody, for any purpose, and in
that link you provided for ‘alien’ you can see repositories that are
labeled ‘system:packagemanager’ as well as ‘utilities’ in addition to
various users’ own home repositories. Once zypper is configured to point
to one of these, it can see which packages are available and add them over
the wire without you doing much of anything, like this:
zypper install alien
zypper finds the repository with the package, pulls it down, and then
tells ‘rpm’ to install it, also resolving any dependencies at the time
(e.g. you need ‘perl’ to run alien’s scripts, so if ‘perl’ is not present,
zypper would find and add that first).
Now we can perhaps get to your question. Does Ysat just pull down perl
scripts ever? Probably not, but it may be used to add a repository, or it
may even be used to query a repository and then have the underlying system
pull down RPMs which themselves container perl scripts. The Command Line
Interface (CLI) can also add the repository and install the package, which
would look like this:
#'ar' is short for add-repository
zypper ar
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/utilities/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/x86_64/alien-8.88-3.1.x86_64.rpm
'opensuse-utilities'
#'in' is short for install
zypper in alien
Where are they located? Wherever the RPM creator (packager) directed them
to be placed in the filesystem. There are several ways to find this out,
both via Yast and the CLI, but I would recommend the latter; assuming the
package is just named ‘alien’ you can query it and list its files using
this command once it is installed:
rpm -ql alien
If you want to delete the scripts, it is best to remove the package, which
an be done either from Yast again, or from the CLI a few different ways:
#rm is short for remove
zypper rm alien
#or
rpm -e alien
When the package is removed, associated files (at least non-configuration
ones like perl scripts) are removed as well. If you checked for the
location of files before as shown above, you could check the paths again
and see they are gone; if you try to query for the ‘alien’ package’s files
again, you’d get nothing back as the package is no longer there to
reference the files (which are also no-longer there).
Give these steps a try and see if things work out for you; if you have
subsequent questions, feel free to follow up here. If not, please provide
your results as well in case I missed anything or one of us can clarify on
something.
–
Good luck.
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