You might have noticed in the examples that installing an rpm requires the full filename, but removing an rpm requires only the name. This is because rpm maintains an internal database of the currently installed packages, and you can reference installed packages by name. For example, let's ask rpm what version of Xsnow is installed:

# rpm -q xsnow
xsnow-1.41-1

In fact, rpm knows even more about the installed package than just the name and version. We can ask for a lot more information about the Xsnow rpm using rpm -qi:

# rpm -qi xsnow
Name        : xsnow                        Relocations: (not relocateable)
Version     : 1.41                              Vendor: Dan E. Anderson http://www.dan.drydog.com/
Release     : 1                             Build Date: Thu 10 May 2001 01:12:26 AM EDT
Install date: Sat 02 Feb 2002 01:00:43 PM EST      Build Host: danx.drydog.com
Group       : Amusements/Graphics           Source RPM: xsnow-1.41-1.src.rpm
Size        : 91877                            License: Copyright 1984, 1988, 1990, 1993-1995, 2000 by Rick Jansen. Allows packaging & necessary changes for Unix/Linux distributions.
Packager    : Dan E. Anderson http://dan.drydog.com/
URL         : http://www.euronet.nl/~rja/Xsnow/
Summary     : An X Window System based dose of Christmas cheer.
Description :
The Xsnow toy provides a continual gentle snowfall, trees, and Santa
Claus flying his sleigh around the screen on the root window.
Xsnow is only for the X Window System, though; consoles just get coal.