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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@xxxxxxxxxxx 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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