Why 'yum clean all' is always showing the "3 files removed" message?

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

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Not happen to me
e9543951bbe38f714ce219b58f3dac98abf674d5.png

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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