Through Virtual Box
was installed Fedora Workstation
36. It for experimental purposes.
For academic purposes yum
was used, the following set of commands were executed:
yum check-update
sudo yum update
yum clean all
With yum update
about of 1GB of software was installed/updated according the case. And with yum clean all
about 54 files were removed - of course according with that specific update - so it would vary in other point of time. I did realize that if immediately and by many times if yum clean all
is executed it shows the ** files removed
message
Question
- Why
yum clean all
is always showing the 3 files removed
message?
Is expected zero because it was already cleaned and nothing more was installed or updated.
What’s in /var/cache/yum
?
First, yum
is now just a symlink to dnf
. (Yum is no more).
Next, if you run dnf clean all
twice in succession, the second time, you’ll get 0 files removed—because as you note files have already been removed:
$ date
Fri 20 May 09:15:07 BST 2022
$ sudo dnf clean all
0 files removed
$ date
Fri 20 May 09:15:12 BST 2022
$ sudo dnf clean all
0 files removed
Is this not what’s happening on your system?
dnf runs a timer in the background that update metadata from time to time:
$ sudo systemctl status dnf-makecache.timer
â—Ź dnf-makecache.timer - dnf makecache --timer
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/dnf-makecache.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (waiting) since Tue 2022-05-17 17:30:34 BST; 2 days ago
Until: Tue 2022-05-17 17:30:34 BST; 2 days ago
Trigger: Fri 2022-05-20 09:36:27 BST; 20min left
Triggers: â—Ź dnf-makecache.service
May 17 17:30:34 thor systemd[1]: Started dnf-makecache.timer - dnf makecache --timer.
so it’s possible that a metadata update occurred between two dnf clean
runs.
That’ll be /var/cache/dnf/
now
1 Like
Huge thanks for the replies, according with them:
What’s in /var/cache/yum
?
There is no /var/cache/yum
directory, but /var/cache/dnf
exists
First, yum
is now just a symlink to dnf
. (Yum is no more)
Understood, practically yum
is an alias for dnf
Next, if you run dnf clean all
twice in succession, the second time, you’ll get 0 files removed—because as you note files have already been removed:
Just today (again with 1 day of difference) was executed sudo yum install neofetch
and then yum clean all
executed - again by coincidence the 54 files removed
message was shown , immediately yum clean all
again was executed, and so on, and again the 3 files removed
was shown.
As you suggested, was executed dnf clean all
- the 3 files removed
message was shown - and again so far many times dnf clean all
was executed and again the 3 files removed
message was shown.
After of some minutes of difference - 2 to 3 - for either yum clean all
or dnf clean all
- the3 files removed
message always is shown. It was tried many times.
So, should I assume that perhaps a daemon is running and creating automatically that 3 files? BTW How I can know what are these 3 files?
Thanks
No, it only runs periodicall, so it’s unlikely that it’s creating files right after you do a clean.
Could you run a clean and then see what’s in /var/cache/dnf
maybe using the tree
command and post the output here please?
Hello and thanks for your support.
Because I didn’t installed guest aditions for Virtual Box yet, I am sharing two figures
Once started Fedora Workstation 36 - prior to execute the yum clean all
command, the content of the /var/cache/dnf
directory is:
- See the next figure (the first
ls
block) - because I am new user I am only able to put one Figure in this post.
after to had executed the yum clean all
command - btw again the 3 files removed
message appears - the content of the /var/cache/dnf
directory is (of course the second ls
block)
Thank You