Raskas’ blog

When installing some rpm’s on a CentOS5 system I encountered a dependency problem.

Apt told me that it depends on a specific file which isn’t provided by any package in the repository. After some investigation I noticed that the rpm WAS available in the repository, and that yum correctly found that package.

The problem was that the specific file needed by the package was a symlink provided by the other package. The symlink file is known by the rpm (rpm -ql /path/to/file gives the rpm) but isn’t know by apt.

Instead of running genbasedir with the location of the repository as only argument, add the –bloat argument.

genbasedir --bloat /path/to/repository

This will solve the problem!

I noticed this problem during the installation of redhat-lsb on a very minimal CentOS5 system. redhat-lsb requires 2 files (which are symlinks), these files are provided by… redhat-lsb itselve…

If you didn’t use the –bloat argument the redhat-lsb package couldn’t be installed with apt, it could be installed with yum or rpm.

In a previous post I wrote about output redirection of STDOUT, STDERR and both to a file. Off course you can do the same to append to an existing file:

ls >> output.txt
ls 2>> error.txt

If you try this with &>> you will receive a bash syntax error:

ls &>> output_and_error.txt
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `>'


How come appending of both STDOUT and STDERR to a file does not work this way? Is this a bug in bash?
Yes, I know I can use the following, but I prefer the &>>:
ls 1>> output_and_error.txt 2>&1


And how come I can’t find a bugzilla for bash?
Yes, I know I can use the command bashbug to send a mail to a mailinglist, but this is not the same as bugzilla.