how to determine the date a port is installed

Peter Pentchev roam at ringlet.net
Wed Jun 11 07:31:33 UTC 2008


On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 10:41:25PM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 12:09:33AM -0500, Novembre wrote:
> > Two questions:
> > 1) Is it possible to determine the date a port/package is installed?
> 
> ls -ld /var/db/pkg/<port>, use the mtime of the directory.
> 
> > 2) How can I delete all the ports/packages installed after a certain date?
> 
> Use a combination of find with the -mtime flag, and pkg_delete.

Not really.  This is a bit dangerous.

The dangerous part is "the mtime of the directory".  It would be much
better to use the mtime of the +CONTENTS file, since it never changes
*after* the package has been installed.

It is possible, though not certain, that the mtime of the directory may
change if another package is installed later which depends on this one -
pkg_add(1) then updates some files, most notably +REQUIRED_BY, to
reflect the new dependency, so that pkg_delete(1) may warn you later if
you try to delete something that other packages depend on.  Of course,
the part with "the mtime of the directory may change" depends a bit on
the filesystem used, but I find it easier to just rely on the +CONTENTS
file that I'm sure should never change - unless I edit it by hand, but
then all bets are off :)

Novembre, you might want to try something like:

# Change the working directory for easier path handling
cd /var/db/pkg

# Create a temporary file with the modification time set to the date
# that you want to examine (in this case, May 15, 2008, 11:00am)
touch -t 200805151100 /tmp/stamp

# Find all +CONTENTS files that have a modification time later than that
# of the "stamp" file
find . -type f -name '+CONTENTS' -mnewer /tmp/stamp

# Extend the previous command - get only the second component of the
# file path, which is the name of the package directory, which coincides
# with the name of the package :)
find . -type f -name '+CONTENTS' -mnewer /tmp/stamp | cut -d/ -f2

That should give you a list; you may redirect it to a file or, if you
are feeling really adventurous, just pipe it to | xargs pkg_delete :)

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev	roam at ringlet.net    roam at cnsys.bg    roam at FreeBSD.org
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