Download Now, Install Later
A quick hack to just download yum updates for a later install: for i in $(yum list updates | awk '{print $1}' | grep -v ^* | sed -e '1,3d'); do yumdownloader $i; sleep 1; done Of course you can put them all in one file and download without using for loop, but I didn't want to write any files to the hard disk. Also, you could have used $ yum check-update but I am more used to $ yum list updates. Keep the system up to date ;)