Ran out of disk space during yum update

[Sam Varshavchik]

Robert Moskowitz writes:

> In the new install I did, I was not alert and did a complete yum update, 
> and my / partition ran out.
> 
> 200 of 300+ packages were updated/installed, of course none cleaned.
> 
> Can I rescue this install by doing a yum clean all and then again do the 
> yum update for the remaining 100+ packages?

Nope. "yum clean all" purges internal yum metadata only. You've ran into a 
known, long-time rpm design defect. If your rpm update operation fails, 
you'll end up with all the updated packages installed, but none of the old 
packages removed. I've bitched about this before, I maintain that this is a 
design defect or a bug in rpm that should be fixed, but nobody cares.

Been there, brought back the trophy. The only way to fix this is to manually 
assemble a list of packages that should've been removed, but haven't, and 
remove them yourself. rpm -q -a --queryformat '%{NAME}\n' returns a list of 
all packages. By sorting them, and with some shell scripting-fu, you'll end 
up with a list of packages names that are installed more than once -- the 
old and the new package. You'll have to prune the list -- some packages, 
like rpm-gpgkey, and kernel, can have multiple versions legitimately 
installed. If you're running x86_64, you may have both 32 and 64 bit 
versions of each package legitimately installed -- you'll have to do 
something else, then.

Then, you'll have to take that list, and for each package, obtain the 
version/release of the old package, then feed the result to another script 
that removes the old version of each package.

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