Check concordance between the package database and the filesystem

Question

Hello, I'd like to write this down :
To list the packages installed in the database, I use
pacman -Qsq
-Q because it's a query on the local database, s to search and q for quiet.
If you would like to list the files installed by pacman on your computer, you would do
pacman -Qqs | xargs pacman -Ql | cut -f2 -d' '
and if you would to count them you could write
pacman -Qqs|xargs pacman -Ql|wc -l
If you'd want to know if the files actually exist, and reporting for errors, you could run
for a_package in $(pacman -Qqs) ; do
for a_file in $( pacman -Ql ${a_package}|cut -d' ' -f2 ) ; do
if [ ! -e ${a_file} ]; then
echo package ${a_package} is broken: file ${a_file} is missing. ;
# use the following if you would wish to remove the broken package.
# sudo pacman -R ${a_package} ;
# break
fi ;
done ;
done
The if test does check if the file, whatever its kind (folder, symbolic link, etc), does actually exist on your computer, and report a problem if the file is missing. In a generality purpose, I used test -e. You could look at the test manpage, to look for more elaborate examples. You can imagine report what kind of file is missing, or run a check of the permissions and owner which file has in the file system.
So, I use this because I recently messed up my system with AUR build that came along with the database, but was hard to debug. I don't know how to distinguish between an AUR package and an official package, so this solution came out to clean my database.
I hope I could post more code snippets here if you find it useful. See you.
Last edited by dkremer (2011-08-12 13:05:26)

Answer 1

Allan wrote:pacman -Qk ?
yes. It does the job as well. Just a question: can you use the output of this command to remove the packages which are broken ?
EDIT: actually pacman -Qqk gives the name of broken packages. My apologies.
Last edited by dkremer (2011-08-14 13:20:23)