makewhatis weirdness in 4.9-stable

Bill Vermillion bv at wjv.com
Sat Feb 28 13:08:40 PST 2004


On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 12:03 , while denying his reply is 
spam, freebsd-stable-request at freebsd.org prattled on endlessly saying:

> ------------------------------

> Message: 10
> Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 10:14:43 +0300 (MSK)
> From: Dmitry Morozovsky <marck at rinet.ru>
> Subject: Re: makewhatis wierdness in 4.9-stable
> To: Kenneth W Cochran <kwc at TheWorld.com>
> Cc: freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <20040228100420.T70804 at woozle.rinet.ru>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
> 
> On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Kenneth W Cochran wrote:

> [snip]
> KWC> >So just delete these stale links (actually, I just check my man page hierarchy
> KWC> >and clean up several stale links ;-)
> KWC>
> KWC> Ok, done; guess we'll see what happens with the next periodic-weekly
> KWC> run...

> You may just run sh /etc/periodic/weekly/320.makewhatis as root to check.

> KWC> On a related note, I have some *very* old files in system
> KWC> directores (/bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/lib,
> KWC> /usr/libexec ...) dating back as far as year 2000,
> KWC> apparently from the original install of 4.0-release and
> KWC> never updated from {build,install}world.  Is there any
> KWC> (safe) way to get rid of that cruft?

> In general no. However, no utility in the base system should break if you
> delete old files; the only victims would be ports or your own scripts/program.

> In your state I would:
> 
> 0. backup (always wise! ;-)

> 1. mkdir /var/chroot && cd /usr/src && make installworld
> DESTDIR=/var/chroot, then compare root hierarchy and /var/chroot

> 2. use sysutils/portugrade to upgrade your ports (use with
> caution, especially when upgrading large sets of ports)

> 3. use sysutils/libchk to locate unused shared libraries (which
> would be the trickest part)

> Or, if you have spare hardware and/or time, just install new
> system from scratch and transit local settings to the new
> system, then shift new system in (I use this technique for major
> hardware upgrades for our servers cluster)

I think   that is a case of overkill from my POV - admittedly
sometimes warped.

Since it is apparent the system is newere than the the 4.0 and
the dates reflect that you could be really crued and perform
la -lat in the directories, which will sort the oldest files to the
bottom, and use that as a starting point.

Find the date of the last new file - all the files below that will
be stale and then just do this.

cd to that directory

find . ! -newer <oldestfiletosave> -exec rm {} \;

To fe safe you could do this first:

find . ! -newer <oldestfiletosave> -exec ls -la {} \;

Then just use your command line editor to change the "ls -la" to
"rm" if the file listsing appears to be the ones you wish to
remove.  Pretty painless if you are not upgrading hardware as
suggested above, 

> End of freebsd-stable Digest, Vol 49, Issue 6
> *********************************************

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com


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