how to ensure yum install was successful in a shell script?

Question

I have a shell script which checks if there is an internet connection (by pinging google), and then calls

yum install packageA packageB --assumeyes

How would I confirm that the packages were installed (or were already installed)? Do I make another yum call and parse the output (I presume this gets very complicated if the system is in another language)?

You could grep or parse /var/log/yum.log

nwaltham
– nwaltham

2011-12-09 14:42:07 +00:00
Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 14:42 — nwaltham
– nwaltham, Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 14:42
Setting LC_ALL=C should switch to English.

choroba
– choroba

2011-12-09 14:44:29 +00:00
Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 14:44 — choroba
– choroba, Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 14:44

doshea · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-13 23:22:28Z

I've used the following method, which might not be foolproof, but seems to work:

Assuming the variable PACKAGES contains the list of packages you want to install, then:

Run yum -y install $PACKAGES (I assume if this is a script, you really want to pass -y to avoid prompting).
Check its exit status in order to detect some failure conditions.
Run rpm --query --queryformat "" $PACKAGES, which will output nothing for each package that was installed successfully, and will output package <name> is not installed for each failure.
Check its exit status, which appears to be the number of packages that were not successfully installed, i.e. will be 0 on success as usual.

This will only work if PACKAGES contains plain package names that yum is expected to find in a repository, not if it contains other things that yum accepts like URLs, file names or Provides: names.

Dan Fego · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09 14:51:16Z

7

Based on this random post, it looks like yum returns an error code to the shell. You can test this out by running a command and then immediately (as the next command) doing:

echo $?

That will print the previous command's return code. Success should be 0, failure of some kind nonzero. But that's just a guess since I don't have a box accessible to me at the moment. :)

answered Dec 9, 2011 at 14:51

Dan Fego

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2 Comments

typingduck Over a year ago

That should be how it works. My version of yum exits with success even on certain failures; yum install non-existant-package && echo "I think that went well"

doshea Over a year ago

As noted above, there are a number of cases where yum returns 0 even though I would consider it to have failed, e.g. you specified a package name but that package could not be found in any configured repository or you specified a file name but the file was not found. yum's exit status is just not that useful.

ajreal · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09 16:03:36Z

6

By ping google.com does not ensure the yum repo you trying to connect is available

The command to check whether a package is already installed :-

yum list installed PACKAGE_NAME

answered Dec 9, 2011 at 16:03

ajreal

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2 Comments

jedierikb Over a year ago

thanks ajreal -- I was just pinging google to see if dns was working and if there was connectivity.

Doktor J Over a year ago

Although this doesn't directly answer the question, it answers my question! +1 for you

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