Re: yum list available weird output

Gerry Reno wrote:
> Seth Vidal wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 5 May 2009, Gerry Reno wrote:
>>
>>> Seth Vidal wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, 5 May 2009, James Antill wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Gerry Reno <[email protected]> writes:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I run this command:
>>>>>> yum -q list available $(rpm -qa --queryformat=%{name}\n) | grep "^ "
>>>>>> 1.0.0-2.fc11
>>>>>> preupgrade
>>>>>> 0.1.0-6.fc11
>>>>>> preupgrade
>>>>>
>>>>> Pipe the "yum list available" output through less, and you'll see
>>>>> what is happening. In general we don't recommend screen scrapping yum
>>>>> output, writing a yum script is often significantly easier (and
>>>>> supported).
>>>>>
>>>>> For what I _think_ you are trying to do above, you probably just want
>>>>> "yum list updates" or "yum check-update" output.
>>>>
>>>> and if you feel you MUST use a script to do this: look at repoquery 
>>>> from yum-utils.
>>>>
>>>> -sv
>>> Ok, through 'less' I can see that the output is being forced onto a 
>>> second line. But rather than do that, it would be better to just 
>>> push the output out by $COLUMNS and it would look exactly the same 
>>> but still be on the same line.
>>
>> did you see what I just said?
>>
>> yum is NOT intended to be screen scraped. Either write a python 
>> script or use repoquery.
>>
> I get your point. But people do scrape these outputs for quick 
> scripts. If you put it on stdout people are going to scrape it pretty 
> much. Anyway, I'll look at making a python script.
>
Ok, I am looking at repoquery but some of the totals do not seem to add 
up. For example:
repoquery -q --pkgnarrow=updates -a | wc -l
498

Now I would expect that when I do this:
for arch in i386 i586 i686 x86_64; do
repoquery -q --pkgnarrow=updates --archlist=$arch | wc -l
done

that the totals for all the arches would equal the 'all' total. But they 
don't. The arches totalled separately add up to more than 100 packages 
more than the 'all' total. How can that be?

Regards,
Gerry