Solution for when rpm -e just spins at 100% CPU

[Andy Green]

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Hi folks -

I found a while ago I had managed to do something to deeply irritate my rpm 
database, such that trying to rpm -e some kernel packages to clean up was 
causing rpm to eat huge amounts of memory and sit there spinning forever at 
100% CPU.  I asked about it on the rpm list some time ago but nobody replied 
(too busy shaking their head sadly I guess).

Yesterday I was in a wild mood, since I found I was now unable to even install 
any kernel packages on this machine, so I tried again to delete old kernel 
packages while watching what rpm was doing with strace.

I found that rpm was spinning touching files from old kernel packages that I 
had deleted by hand.  I did not expect rpm to care since I was asking it to 
delete the package, but for whatever reason rpm becomes highly irritated and 
sits there eating CPU forever in these circumstances, spinning between 
touching a handful of nonexistant filepaths.

After some threshing around, I developed this small script, which I now commit 
to future Googlers with the same problem:

#!/bin/bash
# rpmghost  andy at warmcat.com  2004-04-15

echo "Faking up nonexistant files..."

LIST=`rpm -q --list $1 | tac `

for i in $LIST ; do
 if [ ! -e "$i" -a ! -d "$i" ] ; then
  if [ ! -d `dirname "$i"` ] ; then
    mkdir -p `dirname "$i"`
  fi
  touch $i
 fi
done

The rpmghost script takes one argument which is a package versioned name, not 
filepath, just versioned name, like kernel-2.6.1-1.65.

rpm has an idea of what files belong to what package stashed in its database, 
the script gets rpm to list this for a given package, turns the list upside 
down (so the parent directories are listed last, allowing the dirname/touch 
trick to work) and then creates zero-length files for every file in the 
directory structure.  It basically makes a ghosttown for a deleted package 
footprint.  That's all that is needed.

For people in the same situation with the kernel, for example, you can list 
what kernel versions rpm knows about

rpm -q kernel

Then run this script on each deleted version in turn, eg, if you call the 
script is called rpmghost

rpmghost kernel-2.6.1-1.65

(obviously use the actual kernel version you deleted the files for).

After doing this for each deleted-by-hand package version, rpm -e became its 
old happy self and successfully deleted the packages.  And I was able to 
install new kernels... but from now on I will use rpm -e to delete the files 
rather than rm -rf ;-)

- -Andy

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