[SOLVED] Checking changes made before/after installing application?

[littlebigman]

Hello,

I need to know which files were added/modified/moved/deleted after compiling and installing an application from source code, ie. the command-line, Linux equivalent to the venerale InCtrl5.

Is there a utility that does this, or a set of commands that I could run and would show me the changes?

The following is sort of OK, although it includes the lines where changes occured (eg. "@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@"), and "." and ".." that I don't need:

# ls -aR /tmp > b4.txt
# touch /tmp/test.txt
# ls -aR /tmp > after.txt
# diff -u b4.txt after.txt

Thank you.

[clowenstein]

Look for the program "checkinstall".
CheckInstall Homepage

Excerpt from the manual page:
- - - - - -
checkinstall is a program that monitors an installation procedure (such as make install, install.sh ), and creates a standard package for your distribution (currently deb, rpm and tgz packages are supported) that you can install through your distribution’s package management system (dpkg, rpm or installpkg).
- - - - - -

You can also use RPM to list the files that will be installed, and to uninstall if desired.

[jippie]

find / -mtime -1

Finds all files changed during the last day. The catch is that it finds *all* files that were changed, but so does your own trick

Also when you compile a package, a whole list of files being copied scrolls across the screen. Maybe you can save that with a tee-command into a file?

[littlebigman]

Thanks for the tip on "find". "-mtime" and "-newer" are good ways too.

I do use packages to install/remove applications, but I was looking for a universal way to check what happened to a filesystem after running an application, so that I have a better understanding at what it does, and how.