Extensive "cleanup" operations following "sudo yum upgrade"

sudo yum upgrade && for pkg in $(package-cleanup --orphans -q); do repoquery $(rpm -q $pkg --queryformat="%{NAME}") | grep -q ".*" && echo $pkg; done | xargs sudo yum -y remove && for pkg in $(package-cleanup --leaves --all -q); do repoquery --groupmember $pkg | grep -q "@" || echo $pkg; done

April 16, 2014openiduser143

Explanation

"sudo yum upgrade" does clean up outdated packages that the current upgrade replaces, but not other outdated packages or the ones that it willfully skips. Yes, that's what "package-cleanup --orphans" will finish, but "orphaned packages" also include packages that are at their latest version but just aren't updated by the repositories (usually a discrete .rpm installation). This one-liner uses "package-cleanup --orphans" but wraps around it to skip packages that aren't in the repositories anyway and just removes outdated packages that have a newer version in the repositories.

No, it's not at the end yet. It has a final command to display all packages that don't belong to any group. Choose any of the "manual extension" packages which aren't really necessary and only clog the system.

Limitations

  • Specific to only rpm and yum
  • No, not just yum, it requires the yum-utils package (or whatever else provides package-cleanup and repoquery, if anything)