Re: get list of config files (with aptitude) tha were manually changed

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 06:29:27PM -0500, "A. F. Cano" <afc@shibaya.lonestar.org> was heard to say:
> I know that this is checked somehow as I have been asked which config
> file to install or leave alone when upgrading various packages with
> aptitude.

  I don't know any tool to do this offhand.  But all the information is
in /var/lib/dpkg/status, so it's easy to do this with a script.  The
attached Python script will print out the names of all the conffiles on
your system that have been changed or removed since they were installed.
If you are a non-root user, it also lists conffiles that you can't read;
on my system there are 7 of those.

  Warning: my testing consisted of running it on my computer and
eyeballing the results to check that they made sense.  If it breaks you
get to keep both pieces.

  Daniel

#!/usr/bin/python

import hashlib
import re

f = file('/var/lib/dpkg/status')

conffile_start = re.compile('^Conffiles:\n')

in_conffile = False

for line in f:
    if in_conffile:
        if line[0] <> ' ':
            in_conffile = False
        else:
            # This breaks if any conffile has spaces in its name.
            entries = line.split()
            filename = entries[0]
            expected_md5 = entries[1]

            hasher = hashlib.md5()

            try:
                f2 = file(filename)

                l = f2.read(4096)
                while l <> '':
                    hasher.update(l)
                    l = f2.read(4096)
                seen_md5 = hasher.hexdigest()
                if seen_md5 <> expected_md5:
                    print filename, expected_md5, seen_md5
            except:
                print filename, expected_md5
    else:
        if conffile_start.match(line):
            in_conffile = True