Pacnew and Pacsave Files
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Getting Started
During package upgrades or removal Pacman will inform you of files (usually configurations in /etc
) are being installed with a .pacnew extension or backed up with a .pacsave extension.
A .pacnew file may be created during a package upgrade (pacman -Syu, pacman -Su or (pacman -U) to avoid overwriting a file which already exists and was previously modified by the user. When this happens a message like the following will appear in the output of pacman:
warning: /etc/pam.d/usermod installed as /etc/pam.d/usermod.pacnew
A .pacsave file may be created during a package removal (pacman -R, or by a package upgrade (the package must be removed first). When the pacman database has record that a certain file owned by the package should be backed up it will create a .pacsave file. When this happens pacman outputs a message like the following:
warning: /etc/pam.d/usermod saved as /etc/pam.d/usermod.pacsave
These files require manual intervention from the user and it is good practice to handle them right after every package upgrade or removal. If left unhandled, improper configurations can result in improper function of a the software, or the software being unable to run altogether.
Types Explained
The different types of *.pac* files.
.pacnew
For each file in a package being upgraded, pacman cross-compares three md5sums generated from the file's contents: one sum for the version originally installed by the package, one for the version currently in the filesystem, and one for the version in the new package. If the version of the file currently in the filesystem has been modified from the version originally installed by the package, pacman cannot know how to merge those changes with the new version of the file. Therefore, instead of overwriting the modified file when upgrading, pacman saves the new version with a .pacnew
extension and leaves the modified version untouched.
Going into further detail, the 3-way MD5 sum comparison results in one of the following outcomes:
- original = X, current = X, new = X
- All three versions of the file have identical contents, so overwriting is not a problem. Overwrite the current version with the new version and do not notify the user. (Although the file contents are the same, this overwrite will update the filesystem's information regarding the file's installed, modified, and accessed times, as well as ensure that any file permission changes are applied.)
- original = X, current = X, new = Y
- The current version's contents are identical to the original's, but the new version is different. Since the user hasn't modified the current version and the new version may contain improvements or bugfixes, overwrite the current version with the new version and do not notify the user. This is the only auto-merging of new changes that pacman is capable of performing.
- original = X, current = Y, new = X
- The original package and the new package both contain exactly the same version of the file, but the version currently in the filesystem has been modified. Leave the current version in place and discard the new version without notifying the user.
- original = X, current = Y, new = Y
- The new version is identical to the current version. Overwrite the current version with the new version and do not notify the user. (Although the file contents are the same, this overwrite will update the filesystem's information regarding the file's installed, modified, and accessed times, as well as ensure that any file permission changes are applied.)
- original = X, current = Y, new = Z
- All three versions are different, so leave the current version in place, install the new version with a
.pacnew
extension and warn the user about the new version. The user will be expected to manually merge any changes necessary from the new version into the current version.
.pacsave
A package's PKGBUILD
file specifies which files should be backed up when the package is upgraded or removed. For example, the PKGBUILD
for pulseaudio
contains the following line:
backup=('etc/pulse/client.conf' 'etc/pulse/daemon.conf' 'etc/pulse/default.pa')
If the user has modified one of the files specified in backup
then that file will be renamed with a .pacsave
extension and will remain in the filesystem after the rest of the package is upgraded or removed.
-n
option with pacman -R
will result in complete removal of all files in the specified package, therefore no .pacsave
files will be created..pacorig
When a file (usually a configuration found in /etc
) is encountered during package installation or upgrade that doesn't belong to any installed package but is listed in backup
(see the .pacsave
section above) for the package in the current operation, it will be saved with a .pacorig
extension and replaced with the version of the file from the package. Usually this happens when a configuration file has been moved from one package to another. If such a file were not listed in backup
, pacman would abort with a file conflict error.
.pacorig
files tend to be created for special circumstances there is no universal method for handling them. It may be helpful to consult the Arch News for handling instructions if it is a known case.Locating .pac* Files
Arch Linux doesn't provide official utilities for .pacnew files. You'll need maintain these yourself, a few tools are in next section. To do these manually, first you will need to locate them. When upgrading or removing a large number of packages, updated *.pac* files may be missed. To discover whether any *.pac* file have been installed:
To just search where most global configurations are stored:
find /etc -name "*.pac*"
or the entire disk:
find / -name "*.pac*"
Or use pacmans' log to find them:
egrep "pac(new|orig|save)" /var/log/pacman.log
Note that the log doesn't keep track of which files are currently in the filesystem nor of which files have already been removed.
Managing .pacnew Files
Once all existing .pacnew files have been located the user may handle them manually using common merge tools such as vimdiff, ediff (part of emacs), meld (a Gnome GUI tool), or Kompare (a KDE GUI gui tool), the deleting the .pacnew files afterwords.
A few third-party utilities providing various levels of automation for these tasks are available from the community repository and user repository (AUR).
- Dotpac - Basic interactive script with ncurses-based text interface and helpful walkthrough. No merging or auto-merging features.
- pacdiff - Very minimal and undocumented CLI script. Part of the
pacman-contrib
package in thecommunity
repo. - pacdiffviewer - Full-featured interactive CLI script with auto-merging capability. Part of the
yaourt
package.
Using Meld to Update Differences
Using meld in a loop can be used to update configuration files. This script will loop through the files one by one so you can make differences.
#!/bin/bash # pacnew-update - merge *.pacnew files with original configurations with meld pacnew=$(find /etc -type f -name "*.pacnew") for config in $pacnew; do # save current configuration kdesu meld ${config%\.*} $config & # remove .pacnew file sudo rm -i $config wait done
Use gksudo instead of kdesu (for KDE) for Gnome/XFCE desktop environments. As regular user, you will need to have permissions to be able to edit files, see Sudo.
Resources
- Arch Linux Forums: Dealing With .pacnew Files