Re: Tracking installs

[Jiri Baum <jiri@baum.com.au>]

Hello,

> > > There's a nifty little program PCMag wrote for Win that tracks
> > > installations, and I'd like to have this functionality in Linux.
> > > Before I write my own, is there a utility that will do the same
> > > thing?
> >  
> >  dpkg does all of this :-)
> >  
> 
> I knew dpkg did the install, but where does it track what it did?  Is
> there a dpkg log somewhere?

dpkg generally does a good-enough job of uninstalling packages that you
don't need a separate program to do it.

However, if you want to know, look in the directory /var/lib/dpkg/info -
for each package, there's a list of files, and the install and remove
scripts.

Alternatively you can look at the .deb file directly, which has the added
advantage that you know *before* it starts installing.

To look in a deb file, create an empty directory to work in, cd to it, and
run 
	ar x filename.deb

Then you can look at control.tar.gz for the installation scripts, and
data.tar.gz for the files that are going to be installed.


HTH

Jiri <jiri@baum.com.au>