Maybe you better ask this on the Asahilinux or Archlinux communication channels? pacman is a package manager for arch based distributions. As this is the Mageia forum...a rpm based distribution...maybe this is the wrong channel...
But to answer your initial question:
What instructions can I replace these with?
I personally would start with the basics:
- proper description of what you are trying to do?
- where is this code snippet from?
- why do you want to replace this instruction and against what?
- what is your goal?
- why do you try to exchange it?
- which distribution you are trying to run this on?
- ...
Based on the provided information...i would replace this with a good book

And a small hint for you what these commands are doing on an arch based distribution:
https://archlinux.org/news/having-pacma ... -packages/