[Yum] removing duplicate entries

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 12:12, mw-list-yum at csi.hu wrote:
> While yum was updating packages, I ran 'rpm -qa' and it made both
> processes hang (left them alone for 30 minutes).  After removing the
> __db* files and killing the processes, I was left with duplicate
> entries, such as
> 
> a2ps-4.13b-37
> a2ps-4.13b-41
> acl-2.2.23-5
> acl-2.2.7-5
> alchemist-1.0.33-1
> alchemist-1.0.34-1
> 
> All these packages are reported updated by yum, so I'd like to remove
> the old packages from the rpm database---with yum.  Is there a
> reliable way  of  doing this?  I plan on doing something like:
> 
> 1) collect the duplicate packages' names with 
> 
> rpm -qa|sort|awk  '{ sub("-[^-]*-[^-]*$", "");  print}'|uniq -d
> 
> 2) For each package obtained in 1) find the old  versions with 
> 
> rpm -q $package | sort -n|  awk '{version[NR]=$0}; END{for(i=1;i<NR;i++) print version[i]}'
> 
> and list them in the file old_list.
> 
> 3) Remove these old packages with 
> 
> cat old_list | xargs yum  -y remove  

if this is yum 2.1.X you can specify complete versions on the cli

yum remove foo-1.1-1

-sv