This document is a WORK IN PROGRESS.
This is just a quick personal cheat sheet: treat its contents with caution!

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eselect

eselect is a tool for administration and configuration on Gentoo systems. It will modify the system’s behavior and should be used with care by the system administrator. eselect is a modular framework for writing configuration utilities. It consists of:

• A main program called eselect.
• Various modules (*.eselect files) which carry out different tasks.
• Several libraries which help ensure consistent behavior and simplify the creation of new modules.

A module provides several actions. Actions typically either display some information ("list" and "show" actions are common) or update the system somehow (for example, "set" and "update"). Each module also provides "help" and "usage" actions which explain how to use the module.

Reference(s)

• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Eselect
• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Eselect/User_guide
• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Eselect/Repository
• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Base#Choosing_the_right_profile
• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Python/python-exec#eselect-python
• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fontconfig#Gentoo_specific

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Table of contents

• Install
• Use
  • modules
  • repositories
  • kernel
  • news
  • sh
  • python
  • pip

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Install

eselect should be already installed by default on Gentoo:

# emerge -na app-admin/eselect

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Use

See how to use eslect:

$ eselect help

modules

List all the available eselect modules already installed on your system:

$ eselect modules list

Tip

$ emerge -s eselect to see more available eselect modules.

repositories

See overlays

kernel

$ eselect kernel list

$ eselect kernel set 42

news

$ eselect news list

$ eselect news read

sh

$ eselect sh list

python

$ eselect python list

pip

$ eselect pip list

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