How to find out what files an installer (rpm, deb) created?

Solution 1:

I would be tempted to try running your install via strace. It will be a bit noisy, but you among all the other things it logs, you should be able to see should see everything that gets written.

Here is a command that seemed to get close to showing all file accesses during an installation without too much noise.

sudo strace -o /tmp/install.log -f -e trace=file apt-get install package

Solution 2:

This question's already been answered, but I'll toss in what I do anyway. If all you want is to see if files were created, removed, or changed, you can do this:

find / -xdev -printf '%p\t%c\n' |sort >/tmp/before
rpm/dpkg/apt-get/yum/whatever
find / -xdev -printf '%p\t%c\n' |sort >/tmp/after
diff -u /tmp/before /tmp/after |less

That's it. It clearly won't tell you how a file was changed, but at least you'll know that it did change in some way.