ucfr - Update Configuration File Registry: associate packages with configuration
files
ucfr [
options]
<Package> <Path to configuration
file>
Where
Package is the package associated with the configuration file (and,
in some sense, its owner), and
Path to configuration file is the full
path to the location (usually under /etc) where the configuration file lives,
and is potentially modified by the end user. Please note that usually this
means that we register actual files, and not symbolic links to files.
ucfr will follow symbolic links and register the real file, and not the
symbolic link.
This script maintains an association between configuration files and packages,
and is meant to help provide facilities that
dpkg provides conffiles
for configuration files and not shipped in a
Debian package, but
handled by the postinst by
ucf instead. This script is idempotent,
associating a package to a file multiple times is not an error. It is normally
an error to try to associate a file which is already associated with another
package, but this can be overridden by using the
--force option.
- -h, --help
- Print a short usage message
- -n, --no-action
- Dry run. Print the actions that would be taken if the
script is invoked, but take no action.
- -d [n], --debug [n]
- Set the debug level to the (optional) level n (n
defaults to 1). This turns on copious debugging information.
- -p, --purge
- Removes all vestiges of the association between the named
package and the configuration file from the registry. The association must
already exist; if the configuration file is associated with some other
package, an error happens, unless the option --force is also given.
In that case, the any associations for the configuration file are removed
from the registry, whether or not the package name matches. This action is
idempotent, asking for an association to be purged multiple times does not
result in an error, since attempting to remove an non-existent association
is silently ignored unless the --verbose option is used (in which
case it just issues a diagnostic).
- -v, --verbose
- Make the script be very verbose about setting internal
variables.
- -f, --force
- This option forces operations requested even if the
configuration file in consideration is owned by another package. This
allows a package to hijack a configuration file from another
package, or to purge the association between the file and some other
package in the registry.
- --state-dir /path/to/dir
- Set the state directory to /path/to/dir instead of the
default /var/lib/ucf. Used mostly for testing.
The most common case usage is pretty simple: a single line invocation in the
postinst on configure, and another single line in the postrm to tell
ucfr to forget about the association with the configuration file on
purge (using the --purge option) is all that is needed (assuming ucfr is still
on the system).
/var/lib/ucf/registry, and
/var/lib/ucf/registry.X, where
X
is a small integer, where previous versions of the registry are stored.
/etc/ucf.conf
If the package
foo wants to use ucfr to associate itself with a
configuration file
foo.conf, a simple invocation of ucfr in the
postinst file is all that is needed:
ucfr foo /etc/foo.conf
On purge, one should tell ucf to forget about the file (see detailed examples in
/usr/share/doc/ucf/examples):
ucfr --purge foo /etc/foo.conf
If you want to remove all the conf files for a given package
foo, the
simplest way is to use
ucfq. For example
ucfq -w foo | cut -d : -f 1 | while
read cfile ; do ucfr -v $cfile ; done
ucf(1),
ucf.conf(5).
This manual page was written Manoj Srivastava <
[email protected]>, for
the Debian GNU/Linux system.