Question about Ubuntu support

[Ian Bruntlett]

Hi Charles,

On Sun, 31 May 2020 at 18:45, Charles IRONS <irons.charles at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have used Ubuntu since 2005 and often wondered why packages do not have
> a counter that is increased when it is used actively.
>
> That way each of us could discover which of the many thousands we really
> need.
>

Well, many filesystems (all?) track when a file is accessed and you can use
the stat command to find that info out for one or more files.

Here is an example from my computer:-
$ stat snap-man.txt
  File: snap-man.txt
  Size: 32913     Blocks: 72         IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 805h/2053d Inode: 10511107    Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1000/     ian)   Gid: ( 1000/     ian)
Access: 2020-04-12 19:18:04.714531723 +0100
Modify: 2019-10-17 21:27:36.043240284 +0100
Change: 2019-10-17 21:27:36.043240284 +0100

So, as you can see, some of the data is there already.

Then there is the dpkg command to tell you which package a file is from....
$ dpkg -S /bin/ls
coreutils: /bin/ls

So, I suppose a program could be written to go through all files linked to
all packages and work out which packages haven't been used at all.

But that wouldn't be foolproof. Consider doing the same thing in an office
- a fire extinguisher could be considered unused but you would still want
it available for use.

I am not sure if my idea is viable....

HTH,


Ian

-- 
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