[Mageia-dev] Utter frustration

[Liam R E Quin]

On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 14:01 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:

> > Since there's no identification in the message, all I could suggest
> > is a brute-force search of all files on the root or /usr partitons
> > for the string "ConsoleKit", which appears in the error message.
> > Then, identify the package which owns the file using rpmdrake.
> > 
> Makes sense.  The only problem is I don't know how to do that.  I
> tried to use a combination of cat and grep, but there is no recursive
> flag, so that won't work.  How would you do it?

(1) grep -l -r ConsoleKit .
    this is easiest; -r is "recursive" But it will cross file system
    boundaries, so if you do it from / it will go into /use and /media
    and anywhere else it can find!

(2) find / /usr -type f -xdev -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l ConsoleKit
    This is the usual "find" approach.
    -type f means only print names of files, not directories, symbolic
    links or device files...
    -xdev means don't stray into other filesystems like /home
    -print0 is the same as -print (prints each matching name) but prints
    the filenames with a NUL (character 0, hence the 0 in -print0)
    after each name, instead of putting each file on a separate line.
    This is needed because of filenames containing spaces or newlines.

    xargs reads a list of files, one per line, or, with -0 (again the
    digit zero) separated by NUL bytes; it runs the command on each of
    the files

    The -l option to grep says to print just the filename, needed in
    case there are binaries that contain the string.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Co-author, 5th edition of "Beginning XML", Wrox, 2012