rpm -V - verifying packages

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 17 Jan 2015 21:14:11 -0700, Robin Laing wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I don't know if I found a bug with upgrade or if there is a strange 
> issue with rpm.
> 
> I have upgraded from F19 to F21 on a machine.  The upgrade worked quite 
> well.
> 
> Due to the nVidia driver changes, I installed the nVidia driver from 
> nVidia instead of the normal rpmfusion as the 340 driver was not 
> available.  Today I decided to give the latest Nouveau driver a try but 
> knowing that the nVidia install can and will change files, I decided to 
> check my machine with rpm -Va > rpm_verify.txt
>
> To my shock, many files came back with
> 	S.?......
> for the verification response.  When I say many, the line count is 705 
> files.

As superuser root? 

Any examples?

Failure '?' very often (always?) is an indication that the test could not
be performed because of failure to access the file. Failure 'S' is typical
for config/data or regularly recompiled/optimized files, for example.