Verifying - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 System Administration Manual

• -l displays the list of files that the package contains.
• -s displays the state of all the files in the package.
• -d displays a list of files marked as documentation (man pages, info pages, READMEs, etc.).
• -c displays a list of files marked as configuration files. These are the files you change after
installation to adapt the package to your system (for example, sendmail.cf, passwd, inittab,
etc.).
For the options that display lists of files, add -v to the command to display the lists in a familiar ls -l
format.

15.2.7. Verifying

Verifying a package compares information about files installed from a package with the same
information from the original package. Among other things, verifying compares the size, MD5 sum,
permissions, type, owner, and group of each file.
The command rpm -V verifies a package. You can use any of the Package Verify Options listed for
querying to specify the packages you wish to verify. A simple use of verifying is rpm -V foo, which
verifies that all the files in the foo package are as they were when they were originally installed. For
example:
• To verify a package containing a particular file:
rpm -Vf /usr/bin/vim
• To verify ALL installed packages:
rpm -Va
• To verify an installed package against an RPM package file:
rpm -Vp foo-1.0-1.i386.rpm
This command can be useful if you suspect that your RPM databases are corrupt.
If everything verified properly, there is no output. If there are any discrepancies, they are displayed.
The format of the output is a string of eight characters (a c denotes a configuration file) and then the
file name. Each of the eight characters denotes the result of a comparison of one attribute of the file to
the value of that attribute recorded in the RPM database. A single period (.) means the test passed.
The following characters denote failure of certain tests:
• 5 — MD5 checksum
• S — file size
• L — symbolic link
• T — file modification time
• D — device
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