Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 119691
list query gives different files from filesbypkg
Last modified: 2007-04-18 13:05:05 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.2) Gecko/20040308 Description of problem: rpm --query --list initscripts | grep utmp produces no output whereas rpm --query --filesbypkg initscripts | grep utmp outputs initscripts /var/run/utmp I don't know whether this is a bug in rpm or in the man page -- the man page does say that filesbypkg will "List all the files in each selected package" whereas the description for --list just says "List files in package", but I hardly think the absence of "all" in the second makes the distinction clear. I na�vely assumed that rpm -qla would list all rpm controlled files, and it seems to me that this is a not unreasonable expectation given the documentation; if it isn't meant to, some short description of the intended behaviour would help. I know I can get it with rpm -qa --filesbypkg | sed ...burble... so it's not exactly mission critical! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.2-0.69 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. rpm -ql initscripts | grep utmp 2. rpm -q --filesbypkg initscripts | grep utmp Actual Results: initscripts /var/run/utmp Expected Results: /var/run/utmp initscripts /var/run/utmp Additional info: I've tried this on several differnt RH9 systems with the same result in each case. I'm not sure that "sed" could ever really be described as "easy", but I'll rate this as "low" since the workaround isn't /hard/...
The difference is in whether %ghost is displayed or not. One can argue that %ghost is part of the package or not, there are valid points on both sides. Without a clear call that %ghost files are "in" a package or not, then it is impossible to determine whether the files should be filtered on output or not.
Personally it seems to me that "all" should mean "all" -- everything that conceivably should be incuded, but failing that there are at least two possible ways of fixing this: 1 change the manpage so that it says what the distinction between files listed by --list and --filesbypkg actually is 2 add an argument --including-ghost-files (or --excluding-ghost-files) and change the behaviour of both accordingly. I'd submit a patch for (1) if I knew where to find the docbook source of the manpage. For anyone else who reads this bug, it seems to be possible to get the information I wanted with: rpm -q --queryformat='[%{FILENAMES}\n]' --all but I can't see from the man page why this should include %ghost files when rpm -qla does not, so how can I rely on it continuing to do so?