Rpmorphan For Linux

Rpmorphan is an open source and free software project that has been engineered to find orphan RPM packages on your RPM-based GNU/Linux operating system, such as Fedora, openSUSE, OpenMandriva, Mageia, CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The project intends to be a clone of the deborphan Debian utility, but designed to handle RPM packages.

Rpmorphan is comprised of several command-line tools, such as rpmusage, which displays the last use date of RPM package; rpmdep, which displays the full dependency of an installed RPM package; rpmduplicates, which finds programs with several versions installed; rpmextra, which finds installed RPM packages that not part of the current Linux distribution.

Quite simple actually, as it first identifies all the packages that have no dependencies, and then it lists those packages at a glance, in the terminal window, allowing the user to remove them (all or individual) or view detailed information about each one.

The rpmorphan command features a wide range of options, which can be viewed at a glance by executing the “rpmorphan.pl --help” command, without quotes, in a terminal emulator. The command allows the user to choose an option, such as the ability to force full algorithm, and a target.

Various targets are available, letting users to search if the package is orphan, as well as to apply the chosen option to all packages or specific ones, such as documentation packages, Perl packages, Python packages, common packages, Ruby packages, data packages, etc.

The software is written entirely in the Perl programming language and can be used from the command-line or via a very basic graphical user interface written in Tk. It is compatible with all GNU/Linux operating systems that use the RPM package manager system.