unowned files and directories

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Sat May 23 17:46:42 UTC 2009


Hi!

I now and then check which files on my systems are not owned by any RPM
package. That often turns up a lot's of old and obsolete stuff that
sometimes eats space I'd like to free. During those checks I often find
lots of files and directories that obviously should be owned by some
packages but aren't.

So today I decided to track this a bit closer and do a fresh rawhide
install with standard settings into a VM and check which files and
directories were unowned using this command:

find / | grep -v -e '^/selinux' -e '^/dev' -e '^/proc' -e '^/sys' -e
'^/root'  -e '^/home' -e '^/tmp' -e '^/var/cache/' -e '^/var/tmp/' |
LC_ALL=C xargs -L 250 rpm -qf | grep "not owned" | awk '{print $2}'

That resulted in round about 1800 unowned files and directories. You can
find the full list at http://www.leemhuis.info/files/fedora/unowned

Yes, maybe more stuff in /var should be filtered; same is true for
things like "lost+found". But the list is interesting nevertheless as
lot of things (random examples: "/etc/kde" or
"/usr/lib64/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/xsane") afaics should definitely be owned
by some package(¹).

But I'm a bit unsure what to do with the results. Filing bugs likely
would be huge amount of work as well as and never-ending task for a
small gain.

Options? Just ignore? Or will the automatic test scripts QA iirc plans
to set up check for things like that in the future?

CU
knurd

(¹) the list also leads to question like "why are there /.dbus and
/.pulse?" and "why is there a /etc/hosts.rpmnew right after install and
why does it look quite different"




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