The Yellowdog Updater, Modified, or yum, is a great utility for installing software. It is available on many Linux distributions, and is the primary package manager on newer Redhat and Centos versions.
The default installation of yum is very powerful, but it does not provide the option to download currently installed packages, or download without installing. This may be desirable in cases where a target server does not have internet access, and you need to download sofware packages to an intermediate location.
There is however, a program available specifically for this purpose. It is called yumdownloader and is part of the yum-utils package.
To check if you already have yumdownloader installed, do this...
which yumdownloader
If yumdownloader is not installed, you will get something like this...
/usr/bin/which: no yumdownloader in (/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/root/bin)
As yum itself is typically installed in just about all configurations, you should be able to use it to install yum-utils, which will provide yumdownloader...
yum -y install yum-utils
After installing yum-utils, confirm that yumdownloader is available...
which yumdownloader
Which should now report...
/usr/bin/yumdownloader
Then decide where you want to save the downloaded packages...
mkdir yumdownloads
cd yumdownloads
And download the desired packages...
yumdownloader sysstat-9.0.4-27.el6.x86_64
The above places a copy of the install package in the current directory.
