How to list rpm packages/subpackages sorted by total size
- by smci
Looking for an easy way to postprocess rpm -q output so it reports the total size of all subpackages matching a regexp, e.g. see the aspell* example below.
(Short of scripting it with Python/PERL/awk, which is the next step)
(Motivation: I'm trying to remove a few Gb of unnecessary packages from a CentOS install,
so I'm trying to track down things that are a) large b) unnecessary and c) not dependencies of anything useful like gnome.
Ultimately I want to pipe the ouput through sort -n to what the space hogs are, before doing rpm -e)
My reporting command looks like [1]:
cat unwanted | xargs rpm -q --qf '%9.{size} %{name}\n' > unwanted.size
and here's just one example where I'd like to see rpm's total for all aspell* subpackages:
root# rpm -q --qf '%9.{size} %{name}\n' `rpm -qa | grep aspell`
1040974 aspell
16417158 aspell-es
4862676 aspell-sv
4334067 aspell-en
23329116 aspell-fr
13075210 aspell-de
39342410 aspell-it
8655094 aspell-ca
62267635 aspell-cs
16714477 aspell-da
17579484 aspell-el
10625591 aspell-no
60719347 aspell-pl
12907088 aspell-pt
8007946 aspell-nl
9425163 aspell-cy
Three extra nice-to-have things:
list the dependencies/depending packages of each group (so I can figure out the uninstall order)
Also, if you could group them by package group, that would be totally neat.
Human-readable size units like 'M'/'G' (like ls -h does). Can be done with regexp and rounding on the size field.
Footnote: I'm surprised up2date and yum don't add this sort of intelligence. Ideally you would want to see a tree of group-package-subpackage, with rolled-up sizes.
Footnote 2: I see yum erase aspell* does actually produce this summary - but not in a query command.
[1] where unwanted.txt is a textfile of unnecessary packages obtained by diffing the output of:
yum list installed | sed -e 's/\..*//g' > installed.txt
diff --suppress-common-lines centos4_minimal.txt installed.txt | grep '>'
and centos4_minimal.txt came from the Google doc given by that helpful blogger.
