linux

I got interested today in trying to come up with a solid way of determining when updates were last applied to a RHEL-derived Linux instance. Previously we'd been inferring it from the kernel version, but it turns out there is a convenient "yum history"  or "dnf history" command which will show you all the previous transactions that the package database has seen. However, the output is hard to parse in a script. So here instead, is a little python script which does the thing. Feel free to mangle it to meet your needs: import time import dnf.base b = dnf.base.Base() for transaction in b.history.old(): print('---------------------------------------------------') print(f'Transaction id: {transaction.tid}') print(f'Command line: {transaction.cmdline}') print(f'UID: {transaction.loginuid}') print(f'Return code: {transaction.return_code}') start = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M', time.localtime(transaction.beg_timestamp)) end = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M', time.localtime(transaction.end_timestamp)) elapsed = transaction.end_timestamp - transaction.beg_timestamp print(f'Duration: {start} -> {end} ({elapsed} seconds)') for tran in transaction.packages(): if tran.is_package(): details = f'{tran.name} {tran.version}' elif tran.is_group(): g = tran.get_group() packages = [] for pkg in g.getPackages(): packages.append(pkg.getName()) details = f'Group "{g.getName()}" ({", ".join(packages)})' elif tran.is_environment(): e = tran.get_environment() details = f'Environment "{e.getName()}"' else: details = '...unknown transaction type!' print(f' {tran.action_name} {details}') print() To find only whole system updates, you'd look for command lines containing "upgrade" I suspect.