On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 07:54 +1100, Craig Sanders wrote:
On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 08:59:44PM +1100, Andrew Greig wrote:
Thanks for the reply, I found a way to create the list of software for each machine using rpm -qa and then piped to a log file.
I now have each log file copied into a spreadsheet side by side Column A and Column B (text in B is red), I appended Bito column A and then
the spreadsheet was probably a mistake. text files are easier to work with and compare.
save the sorted data to two text files, one for each machine. ideal format would be one software package per line, with package name and version number.
then use diff. comparing two text files is precisely what it is for.
alternatively, write a simple program (perl or python would be ideal) which loads the packagename+version data into associative arrays, and then prints out the list of package/versions that are on computer A but not on B, and then the list of package/versions that are on computer B but not on A.
either method will give you a much smaller set of data - packages & versions - to check and/or correct....dozens or hundreds of entries rather than thousands.
the list would likely be even smaller if you cared only about package names, and didn't care about versions.
craig
OK. I used the log files I had generated from each machine as output from rpm -qa, the output was not alphabetical ascending so line for line the lists were in no way parallel. I used diff --normal software.log software2.log and got a difference of 1700 files, my expectation was around 100 files difference but I have to go through a few thousand to find them in an analog way. Should I pre-sort the files alphabetically ascending before trying Cheers Andrew again?