Restoring rpm packages

[Paul Almquist]

On Monday 14 March 2005 18:36, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 11:48:46PM +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> > In any case, what I would like to do is to verify all the rpm packages
> > on the system, and to re-install any that are damaged.
> > Is that possible?
> > If it is, is there any script that would simplify the task?
>
> Try 'rpm -Va', to verify all installed packages. (Look at the rpm man page
> to see what the resulting codes mean.) You'll get some "false positives"
> from config files, etc., which change in the course of normal events.
>
True but be aware that rpm -Va will report the full path file names that are 
missing have a had some attribute change since installation.  It does not 
tell you what package they came from.  You can determine that using:
rpm -qf  full-path-filename

If there are a lot files you could write a script to do the lookups for you.  
I did that once a long time ago (somewhere in the redhat 5-7 era) and learned 
that it is possible for one file to be owned by more than one package.  I do 
not know if that situation still exists.

Also the verify will take quite a while to run and use a lot of cpu time.   
The process name is rpmv.   Probably the most time consuming part of its 
check on each file is calculating the md5 checksum.  I normally run it in the 
background like this:

rpm -Va > verify-report-2005-03-14  2>&1 &

You could even do this periodically and do a diff on the reports to see if 
anything changed since the last time or other baseline report.

paul
-- 
Paul Almquist
paul at almquist.name
Eau Claire, WI  USA