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We're developing a java product that's installed via rpm. We have a set of config files that a user can edit. These config files are java properties files in the form:

com.acme.pkg1.setting=something customized 1
com.acme.pkg2.setting=something original 2

These files are marked in the SPEC file with %config(noreplace), so after an upgrade, we could have an .rpmnew file next to it:

com.acme.pkg1.setting=something original 1
com.acme.pkg2.setting=something original 2
com.acme.pkg3.setting=something original 3

Is there a way to merge these files in such a way that only new keys are added to the original file?

My idea was:

  1. filter the keys
  2. sort the keys
  3. use comm(1), something like: comm -23 file.rpmnew.keys file.keys > new.keys
  4. extract key=value from file.rpmnew matching new.keys
  5. append result to original file

How can we achieve all this in from an rpm post-update script?

Preferably using only standard linux utilities (comm, diff, sed, awk, grep, ...)?

1 Answer 1

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  • Build raw original and raw target values without settings:

    sed "s/=.*//g" file_original.ini > file_original.raw
    sed "s/=.*//g" file_target.ini > file_target.raw
    
  • I assume that target will have more options than the original. Build the difference:

    grep -vf original.raw target.raw > newvals.dat
    
  • Add the new Values:

    cp -p file_original.ini file_original.ini.rpmsave
    grep -f newvals.dat file_target.ini >>file_original.ini
    

That`s the basic idea. It needs lots of error handling, clean tmp-file creation and tidying up.

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  • Great idea to use grep -vf. To avoid any false matches, I had to escape "." in the keys before passing it to grep -f. A simple 'sed "s/\./\\\./g"' did the trick.
    – GeertPt
    Dec 14, 2011 at 9:56

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