Safely displaying the number of updates

Question

I like my status bar in dwm displaying the number of pacman updates available. Its a nice constant reminder bugging me to update my system every once in a while.
At first, I simply had something like this in my status bar script "dwm-status":
sudo pacman -Qu | wc -l
This always displayed 0 updates because I was not syncing my local database.  So I added something like this to .xinitrc:
sudo pacman -Sy
This did not work because sudo required a password, so I added something like this to my sudoers file:
%wheel NOPASSWD: /bin/pacman
Staying logged into X11, this was useless, so I made it a daily cron job, which is my current solution.
I'm worried about this being unsafe as described in here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=89328
This thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=89484 discusses this topic a bit, and provides an ugly solution.  something like this:
dir=/tmp/somedir
if [ ! -d ${dir}]
makedir ${dir}
sudo pacman -Sy --dbpath
ln -s /var/lib/pacman/local /tmp/somedir
sudo pacman -Qu --dbpath /tmp/somedir | wc -l
rm -r ${dir}
oh man is that messy for something that I feel like should be one line.  Anyone have any better suggestion? 
bonus:
a solution that allows me to take that nopasswd line out of my sudoers file
a solution that works with yoaurt too
EDIT:  Formatting, spelling, etc..
Last edited by firyice (2011-06-02 18:21:12)

Answer 1

karol wrote:
ebirtaid wrote:I have pacman -Sy as a cronjob; just make sure to run -Syu (if there are updates) before installing anything
Umm, 'pacman -Syu' already installs packages, so the only thing that needs to be updated are the packages from AUR.
I mean run pacman -Syu before running pacman -S foo.  If you have pacman -Sy as a cronjob and it shows updates, and you run pacman -S foo after the cronjob'd pacman -Sy but before pacman -Syu, then it is the equivalent of running pacman -Sy foo.
E: also it's been a while since I have used yaourt but wouldn't yaourt -Syu --aur display the amount of packages to be updated between both the repos and aur or just the aur packages?
Ex2:  In any event if you install cower you can get what aur packages need to be updated with cower -u.  Then if you put pacman -Sy as a cronjob and use 'sudo pacman -Qu | wc -l' to get the avilable pacman updates, you can then use 'cower -u|wc -l' to get the aur updates count to display as well.
Last edited by ebirtaid (2011-06-02 18:52:08)