Linux in a Nutshell, Fifth Edition

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Chapter 5: Package Management

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2006 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

If you want to update your system daily, to keep it current and to be sure you

have the latest security fixes, you can set up a command that you can reissue every

day, or you can set it up as a cron job to run overnight. (See the descriptions of

the cron and crontab commands in Chapter 3 for more information on setting up

a cron job.)

For example, with apt-get, you can set up the command:

apt-get update && apt-get -u dist-upgrade

This command runs apt-get twice: first to update the local package lists, and then

to actually do the upgrade. The dist-upgrade command handles all dependencies

when it does the upgrade, and the -u option prints a list of the packages being

upgraded.

yum, on the other hand, comes with a cron job that can be run daily. This job first

updates yum itself, then updates all the remaining packages:

#!/bin/sh

if [ -f /var/lock/subsys/yum ]; then

/usr/bin/yum -R 10 -e 0 -d 0 -y update yum

/usr/bin/yum -R 120 -e 0 -d 0 -y update

fi

The -R option sets a maximum time, in minutes, for yum to wait before running

the command, -e sets the error level to 0 to print only critical errors, -d specifies a

debug level of 0 to print no debugging messages, and -y assumes “yes” as the

answer to any questions.

The Red Hat Package Manager

The Red Hat Package ...