How to do it...

1. To uninstall packages, run the pip uninstall <package_name> command. This will uninstall most packages on the system.
2. Requirements files can be used to remove a number of packages at once, by using the -r option, such as pip uninstall -r <requirements_file>. The -y option allows for automatic confirmation of file removal.

1. List currently installed packages by running pip list.

1. To show packages that are outdated, use pip list --outdated, as follows:

      $ pip list --outdated
      docutils (Current: 0.10 Latest: 0.11)
      Sphinx (Current: 1.2.1 Latest: 1.2.2)

While it is possible to update all outdated packages at once, this is not available within pip itself. There are two primary options: the first involves using sed, awk, or grep to walk through the list of packages, find the outdated packages, and update them. Alternatively, install the package pip-review to see outdated packages and update them. In addition, a number of other tools have been created by different developers, as well as instructions on how to do it yourself, so you should decide which works best for you.

Note: Automatically upgrading all Python packages can break dependencies. You should only update packages on an as-needed basis.

1. Details of a particular installed package can be shown using pip show <package_name>, as follows:

      $ pip show sphinx
      Name: Sphinx
      Version: 1.7.2
      Summary: Python documentation generator
      Home-page: http://sphinx-doc.org/
      Author: Georg Brandl
      Author-email: georg@python.org
      License: BSD
      Location: /my/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages
      Requires: docutils, snowballstemmer, alabaster, Pygments, 
                imagesize, Jinja2, babel, six

1. Run the command pip search "query_string". The example below comes from https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip_search/, and shows how the output looks:

      $ pip search peppercorn
      pepperedform    - Helpers for using peppercorn with formprocess.
      peppercorn      - A library for converting a token stream into [...]