If you use an RPM-based Linux distribution, you may have run into one or more cases were your system contains orphaned packages. An orphaned package is a package that doesn’t have any packages that depend on it, and in a number of cases the package is no longer required for the system to function correctly. To view the list of orphaned packages on your Linux host, you can use the incredibly useful rpmorphan tool. To install it, you can fire up yum:
$ yum install rpmorphan
Once installed, you can run it to view the list of orphaned packages on your system:
$ rpmorphan
libdwarf
libertas-usb8388-firmware
libsane-hpaio
To get additional information on what rpmorphan is doing, you can run it with the “-verbose” option. This is a super useful utility, and one that will make its way into my SA utility belt!