How to determine which packages need upgrading in Arch Linux?

Solution 1:

checkupdates

The bash script checkupdates, included with the pacman-contrib package, provides a safe way to check for upgrades to installed packages without running a system update at the same time.

System Maintenance

Solution 2:

Looking at the man page something like

pacman -Syu

to sync the database up to the latest version followed by

pacman -Qu

to

-u, --upgrades

Restrict or filter output to packages that are out of date on the

local system. (Only package versions are used to find outdated packages, replacements are not checked here.) This option works best if the sync database is refreshed using -Sy.