Listing packages that were added or updated after an initial Fedora or CentOS installation


I was reviewing the configuration of a system last week, and needed to find out which packages were added after the initial installation. The rpm utility has a slew of options (you can view the list of options by running rpm --querytags | more) to query the package database, including the extremely handy INSTALLTIME option. Using this query value along with my pkgdiff script, I was able to generate a list of packages that were installed (or updated) after the initial install:

$ pkgdiff

lsscsi-0.22-2.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the initial
install
xmms-1.2.11-5.20071117cvs.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the
initial install
gtk+-1.2.10-68.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the initial
install
rlog-1.4-5.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the initial
install
nx-3.3.0-35.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the initial
install
xmms-libs-1.2.11-5.20071117cvs.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after
the initial install
tcl-8.5.6-6.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the initial
install
glib-1.2.10-32.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the initial
install
freenx-server-0.7.3-15.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the
initial install
xorg-x11-apps-7.3-8.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the
initial install
libmikmod-3.2.0-5.beta2.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the
initial install
fuse-encfs-1.5-6.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the initial
install
xorg-x11-fonts-misc-7.2-8.fc11.noarch was most likely added after the
initial install
expect-5.43.0-17.fc11.x86_64 was most likely added after the initial
install

Now this doesn’t take into account package updates, but it should be pretty easy to identify which items were added vs. updated with a couple more lines of shell script (you could cross reference the package list above with /root/install.log if you need to get super specific).

This article was posted by Matty on 2009-09-13 10:14:00 -0400 -0400