Find files not installed by RPM package manager

Question

Is there some way to find out all the files on a given system that weren't installed via RPM? I understand that I can brute force this myself using something like rpmquery -f in a script that loops through all files in the file system, however I was wondering if there is some standard way to do this for RPM based systems (specifically Fedora, which I use at home). Since this for Fedora, it is fine to use yum or dnf to figure this out.

If there is no standard way to do it, does anyone know of some pre-existing scripts to do this? I don't want to re-invent the wheel if I don't need to.

P.S. There is another question similar to this, but it is about Gentoo and Portage, so it isn't totally relevant.

Answer 1

a bit late to the party, but hopefully someone will find this useful:

find /usr/ -exec /bin/sh -c "rpm -qf {} &> /dev/null || echo {}" \;

This command crawls over the file system, and runs rpm -qf on it. rpm -qf prints the corresponding package for a file, and luckily has a return value of 0 if it finds one and 1 otherwise.

If you're brave, you can tie the output to | xargs rm -f, but personally I wouldn't be so brave. Turns out there's a lot of stuff in /usr that's not really owned by anything.

Answer 2

As far as I'm aware, this is not possible with some kind of dedicated command, only via a little scripting. TL;DR - see the links at the bottom. And for rpm-based systems or other binary-based package managers this doesn't make much sense. Such package managers are usually state-based machines intended to keep track of the things that they install themselves, and not to know everything that users sneak onto the system "behind the back" of the package manager.

Where would you draw the line for files that are not owned by rpm files? What about temporary files ( think /tmp and /var/tmp ) or caches ( think /var/cache ) or files created by a user ( /home or /srv or other user-defined mountpoints ).

For source-based distros it might make sense to offer that functionality if the use case limits them to FHS directories used by "system" packages like /usr, /bin, /lib and similar, as opposed to e.g. /usr/local or /opt for 3rd party software.

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See the following similar questions for scriptlets to do what you asked for:

• How do I list all the files not owned by any package in a RPM-based system?
• Mailing list thread: Clever way to find ALL files not owned by RPM?

Answer 3

Per https://superuser.com/questions/555918/how-do-i-list-all-the-files-not-owned-by-any-package-in-a-rpm-based-system, the following command is a solid baseline for what you need:

comm -13 <(rpm -qla | sort) <(find / -type f | sort)

Customize further by filtering the find command to directories of interest (either specifying the list of directories instead of / (e.g. /{usr,bin}) or excluding folders like /proc, /dev, /home, and /tmp.