Once upon a time Saturday 10 March 2007, Wiktor Rzeczkowski wrote:
I did some testing of RHEL v.4 U4 AS, FC3, FC5 and FC6 and seem to
have
been finding that, soon after a fresh installation of the OS on a
non-networked machine, many files were automatically changing. I also seem
to have been finding that some time after package update, the files were
automatically changing again.
/bin/ls is one of the files that were changing. The file is part of
coreutils package. The following are MD5 checksums for /bin/ls on the
specified RHEL and FC systems immediately after installation of the
specified coreutils package (current version). The checksums are computed
by 'md5sum /bin/ls' and the versions of OS and of coreutils are displayed
by 'cat /etc/redhat-release' and 'rpm -q coreutils' (no quotes),
respectively.
what you are seeing is prelink in action. from prelink's man
page
prelink is a program which modifies ELF shared libraries and ELF dynamically
linked binaries, so that the time which dynamic linker needs for their
relocation at startup significantly decreases and also due to fewer
relocations the run-time memory consumption decreases too (especially number
of unshareable pages). Such prelinking information is only used if all
its dependant libraries have not changed since prelinking, otherwise programs
are relocated normally.
you are free to disable prelink if you want.
Dennis