Dumping all Macros from an RPM Spec File

I’ve been doing a lot of RPM packaging lately, and on different (and very old) distros and versions. Sometimes I lose track of all of the macros used in specfiles (_bindir _sbindir dist _localstatedir, etc). There’s no terribly easy way to dump a list of all of the available macros. There is, however, a bit of a kludge. Insert the following code in your specfile before the %prep or %setup lines:

%dump
exit 1

The %dump macro will dump all defined macros to STDERR. The exit 1 will prevent rpmbuild from going on and trying to build the package. If you want to view the output nicely, you can pipe it through a pager like less: rpmbuild -ba filename.spec 2>&1 | less.

Just make sure to remove those two lines when you want to actually build the package.