On Wed, 31 Dec 2008, Josh Paetzel wrote: > Adam Monsen wrote: >> On Tue, 2008-12-30 at 11:13 -0600, Jeremy wrote: >>> How can I find all the files which are not in packages in ubuntu? >> >> Here's an idea: >> >> find / > /tmp/allfiles.txt >> for i in `cat /tmp/allfiles.txt` >> do >> if ! dpkg --search $i >> then echo $i > /tmp/unknown.txt >> fi >> done >> >> You might want "-type f" in that find command. > > You certainly want: > > then echo $i >> /tmp/unknown.txt > > While this approach will probably work, it's bound to be fairly slow. Right. So many of us will want a good solution to this problem that we should probably try to figure out the optimal approach (if there is one). In fact, Ubuntu and other systems should provide us some assistance on this issue. Will the dpkg --search method identify configuration files that were part of the package but later modified by the user? I would think those files would be identified as package files, not backed up, then cofiguration data would be lost. Is that correct? Related to the latter problem -- if you install the newest versions of programs, then overwrite the configuration files with your old configuration files, often from older versions of the program, will that cause problems? I think it usually wouldn't but might sometimes. Mike