Centos – yum should error when a package is not available

centoscentos5yum

I recently ran into a bug in a script where I tried to do the following:

yum -y install another_package.x86_64 some_package.x86_64 && run_my_script

The script ran well on a newer CentOS, but when I tried to execute it on Cent OS 5, some_package.x86_64 was not available. But instead of erroring and stopping yum just printed the message:

No package some_package.x86_64 available.

How can I force yum to error in such situations (which IMO should be the default) to make my scripts more robust?

Best Answer

As you've found, this behaviour changed between RHEL 5 and 6 (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=736694 for some discussion). From that link, checking the return code of yum info <pkg> should allow you to abort your script as required. Something like:

# Set a variable containing the packages to install:
pkgs_to_install='another_package.x86_64 some_package.x86_64'

# Loop over the packages in the list:
for pkg in ${pkgs_to_install}; do
  # Stop executing if at least one package isn't available:
  yum info ${pkg} >> /dev/null 2>&1 || exit
done

# Continue running your original script:
yum -y install ${pkgs_to_install} && run_my_script
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