On Sunday 9 February 2025 23:46:08 Greenwich Mean Time Dale wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> It was mentioned a while ago in a thread that running perl-cleaner
> --reallyall on occasion is a good idea.  It makes sure everything is
> stable.

Well, not everything, but everything related to files linked against older 
versions of libperl.


> So, it hit me, I haven't ran it in a while, month or so.  When
> I did, it re-emerged a lot of packages like it usually does.  Then it
> listed a large list of leftover files.

Were all these files found in a directory belonging to an older version of 
perl?  For example, the current perl is /usr/lib64/perl5, so you'll have files 
like:

/usr/lib64/libperl.so.5.40.0

and symlinks to it from your perl5 directory, e.g.:

~ $ ls -la /usr/lib64/perl5/5.40/x86_64-linux/CORE/libperl.so.5.40
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Jan 19 11:55 /usr/lib64/perl5/5.40/x86_64-linux/
CORE/libperl.so.5.40 -> ../../../../libperl.so.5.40.0


> If it were just a few, I'd use
> equery and such to see what belonged to what and if it was safe to
> remove them.  Thing is, it is quite a long list.  It could take me days
> to check each one.  I found a old thread that talked about a delete
> option.  I check the man page, that option is no longer listed so I
> guess it is no longer available. 
> 
> So, what is the correct way to deal with these and be safe?  Obviously I
> don't want to remove something the system needs.  I also don't want a
> growing list of files that are no longer needed hanging around either. 

If the files you're concerned about are under a directory belonging to a 
previous version of perl , e.g. perl4, then you can remove the lot after you 
run perl-cleaner.


> While at it, is there a way to remove any files that doesn't belong to a
> package?  A system wide clean up if you will. 
> 
> Thanks. 
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-) 

There was some old script to remove cruft, but I have never used it.  I think 
as Gentoo matured over the years, files left behind when you uninstall a 
package have become less likely.

There is 'qfile -o ...'  you can use with 'find' to identify any orphan files 
left in your system, but it assumes you know what types of files to search 
for, e.g. "*.la".  Have a look at the examples in the man page, to see how it 
can be used.