[SOLVED] See what files have been modified from original package?

trusktr · 2011-10-14 09:04:18

Is there a pacman command (or any command) that will tell me what files in the whole system have been modified from their original packaged state?

EDIT 8/31/2013 2:17pm: pacman now has the -Qk and -Qkk options to see files that have been modified, removed, touched, chmodded etc. This works only for packages that contain a valid mtree file. Not all packages contain an mtree file, but efforts by package maintainers are being made to include these in packages. Read more in `man pacman`.

Last edited by trusktr (2013-08-31 21:17:54)

Allan · 2011-10-14 09:36:24

Only for those that have been flagged as "backup" files (i.e. those you get .pacnew/.pacsave files for). This is something that is being targeted for pacman-4.1.

Edit: I do remember a script that compares the files to those in the original package from your pacman cache. I'm too lazy to search for you though...

trusktr · 2011-10-14 10:49:28

How many more versions are targeted before 4.1?

No worries about that, I shall see if I can find it... I wonder how long such a scan would take? Probably a couple hours?

keenerd · 2011-10-14 12:53:39

It should be a lot faster than that. Test with

time find /{bin,opt,sbin,usr,lib,lib32,lib64,boot,etc} -xtype f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum > /dev/null

I get 5.75 minutes, but I am on a slooooow compact flash drive. The CPU only took 44 seconds, the other 5 minutes was waiting for I/O.

Oh, and a lot of weird places where someone packaged a binary (such as sudo, atop, all of cupsd) without read permissions. Probably a bug.

Last edited by keenerd (2011-10-14 12:55:40)

byte · 2011-10-14 13:54:40

There is no native pacman (or related) command, but I made it an habit of mine (coming from Slackware) to create backups of config files with a certain extension before modifying them.
Mostly they are tracked through pacman anyway (backup files), so whenever there's an update that creates a .pacnew file (see the section "handling config files" in the pacman manpage), I have a /etc/file.conf_orig to compare to.
I also try to keep my modifications as minimal as possible or to post feature requests on the bugtracker to get the maintainer to follow the upstream more closely.
That way you could see 1) your modifications with a simple diff between current config and _orig config and 2) what has changed in the update by diffing conf.pacnew and _orig.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-10-14 09:04:18

[SOLVED] See what files have been modified from original package?

#2 2011-10-14 09:36:24

Re: [SOLVED] See what files have been modified from original package?

#3 2011-10-14 10:49:28

Re: [SOLVED] See what files have been modified from original package?

#4 2011-10-14 12:53:39

Re: [SOLVED] See what files have been modified from original package?

#5 2011-10-14 13:54:40

Re: [SOLVED] See what files have been modified from original package?

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