Re: RPM install/update creates files and then disappears?

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On 10/09/2015 01:54 PM, Bond Masuda wrote:
hello,

i'm working on a file monitoring system and I'm noticing files like the
following example being created and then disappearing:

/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Zurich;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Bratislava;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Prague;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Belgrade;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Ljubljana;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Podgorica;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Sarajevo;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Skopje;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Zagreb;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Belfast;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Guernsey;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Isle_of_Man;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/Jersey;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Europe/London;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/GB;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/GB-Eire;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Etc/UTC;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Etc/Universal;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Etc/Zulu;56177f7a
/usr/share/zoneinfo/right/UTC;56177f7a

The sample above happened during a tzdata package update. Does rpm
create these files and then moves them to destination (over the old file
during an update)? Or, does it move the old file to files in the format
above and then deletes them when the new file install is completed?  If
so, how does it determine the "suffix" string, like ";56177f7a" in the
above samples? Is it randomly generated? What's the nature of this
suffix string? Is it always 8 characters wide? it seems to allow for
alphanumeric characters, but does that include capital letters? Are any
other characters allowed in the suffix string?

The suffixed filenames are indeed temporaries used during unpacking the rpm file, rename()'d to the final destination once unpacking successfully completes.

The suffix itself is rather arbitrary and you shouldn't rely too much on it, but for the past decade plus some its been an eight character lowercase hex string formed from "transaction id" which is just a 32bit time(2) stamp at the beginning of that particular transaction. For example in your particular case:

[pmatilai@dhcp195 ~]$ python -c "import time; print time.ctime(0x56177f7a)"
Fri Oct  9 11:48:58 2015

FWIW, the transaction id (tid) recorded during installs so if you know a tid you can query which packages where installed during that transaction, eg

$ rpm -q --tid 0x56177f7a

	- Panu -

If I can understand this better, I can write rules to categorize them as
being part of some RPM activity. Just need to understand what they are,
and what kind of patterns I can look for.

Thanks,
Bond
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