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58-540: Although it was created for use in Red Hat Linux , RPM is now used in many Linux distributions such as PCLinuxOS , Fedora Linux , AlmaLinux , CentOS , openSUSE , OpenMandriva and Oracle Linux . It has also been ported to some other operating systems , such as Novell NetWare (as of version 6.5 SP3), IBM's AIX (as of version 4), IBM i , and ArcaOS . An RPM package can contain an arbitrary set of files. Most RPM files are "binary RPMs" (or BRPMs) containing

116-463: A built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities. In version 6 Red Hat moved to glibc 2.1, egcs-1.2 , and to the 2.2 kernel. It was the first version to use the GNOME as its default graphical environment. It also introduced Kudzu , a software library for automatic discovery and configuration of hardware. Version 7 was released in preparation for the 2.4 kernel, although

174-478: A case, the developer could provide only an SRPM, which is still an installable RPM. This is a special version of SRPM. It contains "SPEC" file and optionally patches, but does not include sources (usually because of license). As of June 2010, there are two versions of RPM in development: one led by the Fedora Project and Red Hat, and the other by a separate group led by a previous maintainer of RPM,

232-400: A different underlying implementation, most commonly being converted to Perl , Python , or C . The interpreter directive allows the implementation detail to be fully hidden inside the script, rather than being exposed as a filename extension, and provides for seamless reimplementation in different languages with no impact on end users. While files with the ".sh" file extension are usually

290-777: A former employee of Red Hat. The rpm.org community's first major code revision was in July 2007; version 4.8 was released in January 2010, version 4.9 in March 2011, 4.10 in May 2012, 4.11 in January 2013, 4.12 in September 2014 and 4.13 in July 2015. This version is used by distributions such as Fedora Linux , Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives , openSUSE , SUSE Linux Enterprise , Unity Linux , Mageia , OpenEmbedded , Tizen and OpenMandriva Lx (formerly Mandriva ). Jeff Johnson,

348-468: A given directory. In this case, the shell script would start with its normal starting line of #!/bin/sh . Following this, the script executes the command clear which clears the terminal of all text before going to the next line. The following line provides the main function of the script. The ls -al command lists the files and directories that are in the directory from which the script is being run. The ls command attributes could be changed to reflect

406-521: A multiple-use scripting language package which is used with the command shell, Windows Script Host and CGI programming—are available for these systems as well. Mac OS X and subsequent are Unix-like as well. In addition to the aforementioned tools, some POSIX and OS/2 functionality can be used with the corresponding environmental subsystems of the Windows NT operating system series up to Windows 2000 as well. A third, 16-bit subsystem often called

464-556: A previous version of GCC for compiling the kernel, called "kgcc". As of Red Hat Linux 7.0, UTF-8 was enabled as the default character encoding for the system. This had little effect on English -speaking users, but enabled much easier internationalisation and seamless support for multiple languages, including ideographic , bi-directional and complex script languages along with European languages . However, this did cause some negative reactions among existing Western European users, whose legacy ISO-8859 –based setups were broken by

522-458: A script and re-run it to detect and fix bugs. Non-expert users can use scripting to tailor the behavior of programs, and shell scripting provides some limited scope for multiprocessing. On the other hand, shell scripting is prone to costly errors. Inadvertent typing errors such as rm -rf * / (instead of the intended rm -rf */ ) are folklore in the Unix community; a single extra space converts

580-665: A script for POSIX -compliant shells, here named build and kept in the directory with them, which would compile them automatically: The script would allow a user to save the file being edited, pause the editor, and then just run ./build to create the updated program, test it, and then return to the editor. Since the 1980s or so, however, scripts of this type have been replaced with utilities like make which are specialized for building programs. Simple batch jobs are not unusual for isolated tasks, but using shell loops, tests, and variables provides much more flexibility to users. A POSIX sh script to convert JPEG images to PNG images, where

638-448: A shell script is much quicker than writing the equivalent code in other programming languages. The many advantages include easy program or file selection, quick start, and interactive debugging. A shell script can be used to provide a sequencing and decision-making linkage around existing programs, and for moderately sized scripts the absence of a compilation step is an advantage. Interpretive running makes it easy to write debugging code into

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696-435: A shell script of some kind, most shell scripts do not have any filename extension. Perhaps the biggest advantage of writing a shell script is that the commands and syntax are exactly the same as those directly entered at the command-line. The programmer does not have to switch to a totally different syntax, as they would if the script were written in a different language, or if a compiled language were used. Often, writing

754-462: A shell than a shell script." Similarly, more complex scripts can run into the limitations of the shell scripting language itself; the limits make it difficult to write quality code, and extensions by various shells to ameliorate problems with the original shell language can make problems worse. Many disadvantages of using some script languages are caused by design flaws within the language syntax or implementation, and are not necessarily imposed by

812-492: A single installation command needs to specify all the relevant packages. RPMs are often collected centrally in one or more repositories on the internet. A site often has its own RPM repositories which may either act as local mirrors of such internet repositories or be locally maintained collections of useful RPMs. Several front-ends to RPM ease the process of obtaining and installing RPMs from repositories and help in resolving their dependencies. These include: Working behind

870-477: A user (using RPM) installs a package, thus enabling the user (via RPM) to reverse the changes and remove the package later. If the database gets corrupted (which is possible if the RPM client is killed ), the index databases can be recreated with the rpm --rebuilddb command. Whilst the RPM format is the same across different Linux distributions , the detailed conventions and guidelines may vary across them. An RPM

928-428: A way that allows the new script to still act as a fully normal Unix command . One example would be to create a version of ls , the command to list files, giving it a shorter command name of l , which would be normally saved in a user's bin directory as /home/ username /bin/l , and a default set of command options pre-supplied. Here, the first line uses a shebang to indicate which interpreter should execute

986-483: Is Old shell ( osh ), whose manual page states it "is an enhanced, backward-compatible port of the standard command interpreter from Sixth Edition UNIX." So called remote shells such as are really just tools to run a more complex shell on a remote system and have no 'shell' like characteristics themselves. Many powerful scripting languages have been introduced for tasks that are too large or complex to be comfortably handled with ordinary shell scripts, but for which

1044-592: Is Bash, which offers the same grammar and syntax as the Bourne shell, and which also provides a POSIX-compliant mode. As such, most shell scripts written for the Bourne shell can be run in BASH, but the reverse may not be true since BASH has extensions which are not present in the Bourne shell. As such, these features are known as bashisms . Interoperability software such as Cygwin , the MKS Toolkit , Interix (which

1102-418: Is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell , a command-line interpreter . The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be command languages . Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipulation, program execution, and printing text. A script which sets up the environment, runs the program, and does any necessary cleanup or logging, is called a wrapper . The term

1160-472: Is a spec file. Spec files end in the ".spec" suffix and contain the package name, version, RPM revision number, steps to build, install, and clean a package, and a changelog. Multiple packages can be built from a single RPM spec file, if desired. RPM packages are created from RPM spec files using the rpmbuild tool. Spec files are usually distributed within SRPM files, which contain the spec file packaged along with

1218-475: Is also used more generally to mean the automated mode of running an operating system shell; each operating system uses a particular name for these functions including batch files (MSDos-Win95 stream, OS/2 ), command procedures (VMS), and shell scripts ( Windows NT stream and third-party derivatives like 4NT —article is at cmd.exe ), and mainframe operating systems are associated with a number of terms. Shells commonly present in Unix and Unix-like systems include

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1276-554: Is available in the Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX), Hamilton C shell , UWIN (AT&T Unix for Windows) and others allow Unix shell programs to be run on machines running Windows NT and its successors, with some loss of functionality on the MS-DOS - Windows 95 branch, as well as earlier MKS Toolkit versions for OS/2. At least three DCL implementations for Windows type operating systems—in addition to XLNT ,

1334-406: Is delivered in a single file, normally with a filename in the format: For example, in the package filename libgnomeuimm-2.0-2.0.0_3.i386.rpm , the <name> is libgnomeuimm , the <version> is 2.0 , the <release> is 2.0.0_3 , and the <architecture> is i386 . The associated source package would be named libgnomeuimm-2.0-2.0.0_3.src.rpm RPMs with

1392-830: Is possible to write reasonably sophisticated applications as shell scripts. However, they are still limited by the fact that most shell languages have little or no support for data typing systems, classes, threading, complex math, and other common full language features, and are also generally much slower than compiled code or interpreted languages written with speed as a performance goal. The standard Unix tools sed and awk provide extra capabilities for shell programming; Perl can also be embedded in shell scripts as can other scripting languages like Tcl . Perl and Tcl come with graphics toolkits as well. Scripting languages commonly found on UNIX, Linux, and POSIX-compliant operating system installations include: The C and Tcl shells have syntax quite similar to that of said programming languages, and

1450-545: Is the slow execution speed and the need to launch a new process for almost every shell command executed. When a script's job can be accomplished by setting up a pipeline in which efficient filter commands perform most of the work, the slowdown is mitigated, but a complex script is typically several orders of magnitude slower than a conventional compiled program that performs an equivalent task. There are also compatibility problems between different platforms. Larry Wall , creator of Perl , famously wrote that "It's easier to port

1508-399: Is used), and the "$ @" causes any parameters given to l to pass through as parameters to ls, so that all of the normal options and other syntax known to ls can still be used. The user could then simply use l for the most commonly used short listing. Another example of a shell script that could be used as a shortcut would be to print a list of all the files and directories within

1566-427: The noarch.rpm extension do not depend on a particular CPU architecture. For example, these RPMs may contain graphics and text for other programs to use. They may also contain shell scripts or programs written in other interpreted programming languages such as Python . The RPM contents also include a package label , which contains the following pieces of information: The package label fields do not need to match

1624-515: The Fedora Legacy project until the updates were discontinued in early 2007. Version 3.0.3 was one of the first Linux distributions to support ELF (Executable and Linkable Format) binaries instead of the older a.out format. Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda developed by Ketan Bagal, intended to be easy to use for novices, and which has since been adopted by some other Linux distributions. It also introduced

1682-508: The Korn shell , the Bourne shell , and GNU Bash . While a Unix operating system may have a different default shell, such as Zsh on macOS , these shells are typically present for backwards compatibility. Comments are ignored by the shell. They typically begin with the hash symbol ( # ), and continue until the end of the line. The shebang , or hash-bang, is a special kind of comment which

1740-737: The Korn shells and Bash are developments of the Bourne shell, which is based on the ALGOL language with elements of a number of others added as well. On the other hand, the various shells plus tools like awk , sed , grep , and BASIC , Lisp , C and so forth contributed to the Perl programming language. Other shells that may be available on a machine or for download and/or purchase include: Related programs such as shells based on Python , Ruby , C , Java , Perl , Pascal , Rexx etc. in various forms are also widely available. Another somewhat common shell

1798-623: The MS-DOS subsystem uses the Command.com provided with these operating systems to run the aforementioned MS-DOS batch files. The console alternatives 4DOS , 4OS2 , FreeDOS , Peter Norton 's NDOS and 4NT / Take Command which add functionality to the Windows NT-style cmd.exe, MS-DOS/Windows 95 batch files (run by Command.com), OS/2's cmd.exe, and 4NT respectively are similar to the shells that they enhance and are more integrated with

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1856-535: The OS/2 subsystem. Scripting languages are, by definition, able to be extended; for example, a MS-DOS/Windows 95/98 and Windows NT type systems allows for shell/batch programs to call tools like KiXtart , QBasic , various BASIC , Rexx , Perl , and Python implementations, the Windows Script Host and its installed engines. On Unix and other POSIX -compliant systems, awk and sed are used to extend

1914-578: The RPM maintainer since 1999, continued development efforts together with participants from several other distributions. RPM version 5 was released in May 2007. This version was used by distributions such as Wind River Linux (until Wind River Linux 10), Rosa Linux, and OpenMandriva Lx (former Mandriva Linux which switched to rpm5 in 2011) and also by the OpenPKG project which provides packages for other common UNIX-platforms. OpenMandriva Lx has switched back to rpm.org for 4.0 release. OpenEmbedded ,

1972-477: The Windows Script Host, which comes with three pre-installed engines, VBScript, JScript , and VBA and to which numerous third-party engines can be added, with Rexx, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl having pre-defined functions in 4NT and related programs. PC DOS is quite similar to MS-DOS, whilst DR DOS is more different. Earlier versions of Windows NT are able to run contemporary versions of 4OS2 by

2030-468: The advantages of a script are desirable and the development overhead of a full-blown, compiled programming language would be disadvantageous. The specifics of what separates scripting languages from high-level programming languages is a frequent source of debate, but, generally speaking, a scripting language is one which requires an interpreter. Shell scripts often serve as an initial stage in software development, and are often subject to conversion later to

2088-448: The backend database although since 4.15 in 2019, it supports building rpm packages without Berkeley DB ( –disable-bdb ). Features of RPM include: Packages may come from within a particular distribution (for example Red Hat Enterprise Linux ) or be built for it by other parties (for example RPM Fusion for Fedora Linux). Circular dependencies among mutually dependent RPMs (so-called " dependency hell ") can be problematic; in such cases

2146-517: The calling script does not have those abilities, self-writing and self-modifying code, techniques like recursion , direct memory access, various types of sorting and more, which are difficult or impossible in the main script, and so on. Visual Basic for Applications and VBScript can be used to control and communicate with such things as spreadsheets, databases, scriptable programs of all types, telecommunications software, development tools, graphics tools and other software which can be accessed through

2204-639: The change. Version 8.0 was also the second to include the Bluecurve desktop theme . It used a common theme for GNOME-2 and KDE 3.0.2 desktops, as well as OpenOffice-1.0. KDE members did not appreciate the change, claiming that it was not in the best interests of KDE. Version 9 supported the Native POSIX Thread Library , which was ported to the 2.4 series kernels by Red Hat. Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible copyright and patent problems. For example, MP3 support

2262-488: The command from one that deletes all subdirectories contained in the current directory, to one which deletes everything from the file system's root directory . Similar problems can transform cp and mv into dangerous weapons, and misuse of the > redirect can delete the contents of a file. This is made more problematic by the fact that many UNIX commands differ in name by only one letter: cp , cd , dd , df , etc. Another significant disadvantage

2320-429: The compiled version of some software. There are also "source RPMs" (or SRPMs) containing the source code used to build a binary package. These have an appropriate tag in the file header that distinguishes them from normal (B)RPMs, causing them to be extracted to /usr/src on installation. SRPMs customarily carry the file extension ".src.rpm" (.spm on file systems limited to 3 extension characters, e.g. old DOS FAT ). RPM

2378-598: The existing code not to compile. In particular, the use of a non-released version of GCC caused some criticism, e.g. from Linus Torvalds and the GCC Steering Committee; Red Hat was forced to defend this decision. GCC 2.96 failed to compile the Linux kernel, and some other software used in Red Hat, due to stricter checks. It also had an incompatible C++ ABI with other compilers. The distribution included

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2436-480: The filename. Libraries are distributed in two separate packages for each version. One contains the precompiled code for use at run-time, while the second one contains the related development files such as headers, etc. Those packages have "-devel" appended to their name field. The system administrator should ensure that the versions of the binary and development packages match. The format is binary and consists of four sections: The "Recipe" for creating an RPM package

2494-469: The first release still used the stable 2.2 kernel. Glibc was updated to version 2.1.92, which was a beta of the upcoming version 2.2 and Red Hat used a patched version of GCC from CVS that they called "2.96". The decision to ship an unstable GCC version was due to GCC 2.95's bad performance on non-i386 platforms, especially DEC Alpha . Newer GCCs had also improved support for the C++ standard, which caused much of

2552-612: The image names are provided on the command-line—possibly via wildcards—instead of each being listed within the script, can be created with this file, typically saved in a file like /home/ username /bin/jpg2png The jpg2png command can then be run on an entire directory full of JPEG images with just /home/ username /bin/jpg2png *.jpg Many modern shells also supply various features usually found only in more sophisticated general-purpose programming languages , such as control-flow constructs, variables, comments , arrays, subroutines and so on. With these sorts of features available, it

2610-401: The implementation. pm provides greatly enhanced database support for tracking and verifying installed packages. For a system administrator performing software installation and maintenance, the use of package management rather than manual building has advantages such as simplicity, consistency and the ability for these processes to be automated and non-interactive. rpm uses Berkeley DB as

2668-404: The included software packages – not contributions to the distribution as such. This was changed in late 2003 when Red Hat Linux merged with the community -based Fedora Project . The new plan was to draw most of the codebase from Fedora Linux when creating new Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions. Fedora Linux replaced the original Red Hat Linux download and retail version. The model is similar to

2726-600: The last major user of RPM5, switched back to rpm.org due to issues in RPM5. Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux . Red Hat published the first non-beta release in May 1995. It included the Red Hat Package Manager as its packaging format, and over time RPM has served as

2784-406: The needs of the user. Shell scripts allow several commands that would be entered manually at a command-line interface to be executed automatically, and without having to wait for a user to trigger each stage of the sequence. For example, in a directory with three C source code files, rather than manually running the four commands required to build the final program from them, one could instead create

2842-510: The relationship between Netscape Communicator and Mozilla , or StarOffice and OpenOffice.org , although in this case the resulting commercial product is also fully free software . Release dates were drawn from announcements on comp.os.linux.announce . Version names are chosen as to be cognitively related to the prior release, yet not related in the same way as the release before that. The Fedora and Red Hat Projects were merged on September 22, 2003. Shell script A shell script

2900-411: The rest of the script, and the second line makes a listing with options for file format indicators, columns, all files (none omitted), and a size in blocks. The LC_COLLATE=C sets the default collation order to not fold upper and lower case together, not intermix dotfiles with normal filenames as a side effect of ignoring punctuation in the names (dotfiles are usually only shown if an option like -a

2958-405: The scenes of the package manager is the RPM database, stored in /var/lib/rpm . It uses Berkeley DB as its back-end. It consists of a single database ( Packages ) containing all of the meta information of the installed RPMs. Multiple databases are created for indexing purposes, replicating data to speed up queries. The database is used to keep track of all files that are changed and created when

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3016-406: The source code. A typical RPM is pre-compiled software ready for direct installation. The corresponding source code can also be distributed. This is done in an SRPM, which also includes the "SPEC" file describing the software and how it is built. The SRPM also allows the user to compile, and perhaps modify, the code itself. A software package could contain only platform independent scripts. In such

3074-581: The starting point for several other distributions, such as Mandriva Linux and Yellow Dog Linux . In 2003, Red Hat discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for enterprise environments. Fedora Linux , developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat, is a free-of-cost alternative intended for home use. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on April 30, 2004, although updates were published for it through 2006 by

3132-433: The string and numeric processing ability of shell scripts. Tcl , Perl, Rexx, and Python have graphics toolkits and can be used to code functions and procedures for shell scripts which pose a speed bottleneck (C, Fortran, assembly language &c are much faster still) and to add functionality not available in the shell language such as sockets and other connectivity functions, heavy-duty text processing, working with numbers if

3190-480: The system uses to determine what interpreter to use to execute the file. The shebang must be the first line of the file, and start with " #! ". In Unix-like operating systems, the characters following the " #! " prefix are interpreted as a path to an executable program that will interpret the script. A shell script can provide a convenient variation of a system command where special environment settings, command options, or post-processing apply automatically, but in

3248-442: The use of a text-based command-line; there are a number of shells which use other shell programming languages or even full-fledged languages like Scsh (which uses Scheme ). Different scripting languages may share many common elements, largely due to being POSIX based, and some shells offer modes to emulate different shells. This allows a shell script written in one scripting language to be adapted into another. One example of this

3306-450: Was disabled in both Rhythmbox and XMMS ; instead, Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis , which has no patents. MP3 support, however, could be installed afterwards, through the use of packages. Support for Microsoft's NTFS file system was also missing, but could be freely installed as well. Red Hat Linux was originally developed exclusively inside Red Hat, with the only feedback from users coming through bug reports and contributions to

3364-647: Was originally written in 1997 by Erik Troan and Marc Ewing , based on pms , rpp , and pm experiences. pm was written by Rik Faith and Doug Hoffman in May 1995 for Red Hat Software, its design and implementations were influenced greatly by pms , a package management system by Faith and Kevin Martin in the fall of 1993 for the Bogus Linux Distribution. pm preserves the " Pristine Sources + patches" paradigm of pms , while adding features and eliminating arbitrary limitations present in

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