Re: tip: automated way to delete duplicate rpms

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oldman wrote:
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Kim Lux wrote:
I recently updated a server from fc3 to fc6.  All seemed to go well
except the first yum attempt to update the machine failed and when I
entered synaptic I received a ton of errors about duplicate rpms
installed on the machine.  I've run into this issue before.
Unfortunately neither yum nor synaptic has a way to deal with it, as far
as I can tell.
Rather than manually go through the list of offending rpms and delete
them, I did things semi automatically.  There were 120 duplicate rpms on
my machine, so manually typing the full package names would have taken a
while.

Here is what I did instead.

1) Generate a list of all the rpm packages installed.

$rpm -qa --queryformat '%{name}\n' > pkglist

This generates an unsorted list that looks like this.
libavc1394
libmusicbrainz
ethtool
desktop-file-utils
less
time
libXrandr
rmt

2) Sort the list and find the duplicates

$sort -g pkglist | uniq -d > duplicates

This list will look like
a2ps
anacron
at
audit
...

3) Generate a list of the packages with versions to look at and edit

I created a small script file called dupWithVersions with this in it

for pkg in `cat duplicates`; do
  rpm -q $pkg
done

Redirect the output to another file like this.  $dupWithVersions
removeList
The remove list will look like this:

a2ps-4.13b-57
a2ps-4.13b-57.fc6.3
anacron-2.3-41.fc6
anacron-2.3-44.fc6
at-3.1.8-82.fc6
at-3.1.8-84.fc6
audit-1.2.8-1.fc6
audit-1.3-2.fc6

Go through the remove list and manually remove the versions you want to
KEEP !  Remember this is a list of rpms you want to remove !

4) Remove the rpms in the remove list.

To do this I generated a little script as follows:

for pkg in `cat removelist`; do
  rpm -e $pkg
done

This process quickly and correctly removed the duplicate rpms from my
machine. I hope this helps someone.
	This worries me a little bit.  If you remove a package aren't you
likely to remove identically named files from the newer package as well?

	I ask because I usually do a rpm -e --justdb <pkgname> as I once found
myself without some services after deleting an old package.

Scott

The safest way to remove the older package remnants is to download the newer packages and run
'rpm -Uvh --replacepkgs --replacefiles packagename(s).arch.rpm'
because of the reasons that you pointed to. If the older package has files that are the same name as used in the newer package, erasure of the files is probable when you erase the older version of the rpm.

Running 'rpm -Uvh --justdb --nodeps packagename(s).arch.rpm' will safely only remove the database entry but will leave the documentation (has a version number) and any files that are not contained within the new package lingering on your system. But for most occasions that I seen, each version of an rpm usually has files placed in the same location and will differ only in date and other file characteristics. That is why when you do an 'rpm -qV packagename' on the older package you usually see a lot of output with file details being different and when checking the later version you get no output because all is well with the newer version rpm.

I think so anyway! :-)
Jim

--
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction
rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
		-- John Kenneth Galbraith

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