On my system there is a nasty buildup of .rpmnew files. This is because the installation of i386 and x86_64 versions of the same package fight over the config files: one wins and the other creates a .rpmnew. And they only differ in timestamp. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=128622 I don't have problems with a buildup of .rpmsave or .rpmorig files but that could happen. http://www.redhat.com/archives/rpm-list/2003-May/msg00426.html To deal with this stupidity, I use the following shell script. For each .rpmnew file (found by locate), the file is compared with the non-rpmnew version. If the files have identical content (ignoring permissions and timestamps) the .rpmnew is deleted; otherwise, a diff is done. If there is actually a difference, it is a good idea to try to figure out why and fix it. One source of differences is customization that you have done (you don't want this blown away). Another source is a change made as part of the update (intended to be an improvement!). http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-December/msg04713.html # remove .rpmnew files that have content that is the same as the base file set -u -e locate '*.rpmnew' | while read FS do F=`expr match "$FS" '\(.*\)\.rpmnew$'` if cmp "$F" "$FS" then echo remove "$FS" rm "$FS" else [ "$?" == 1 ] && diff -u "$F" "$FS" || : fi done
