Gentoo Question

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What is that .keep file that shows up everywhere?

delta407 · Posted: Tue Jul 09, 2002 12:13 am Post subject:

It's a zero-byte file that forces tar to make an otherwise empty directory. If a directory is empty, tar will ignore it, and it won't get created; hence, .keep.

You can delete them if you like.
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xorbe · Posted: Sat Jul 20, 2002 4:33 pm Post subject:

fghellar · Posted: Sat Jul 20, 2002 5:14 pm Post subject:

The .keep files are there to prevent portage from deleting important directories when you unmerge something that would cause those directories to be empty.
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20435

Some answers from other threads:

dwyrm · n00b Joined: 13 Dec 2003 Posts: 19

Are they supposed to be empty? I stumbled across one that actually contained some data.

orionrobots · Posted: Tue Dec 30, 2003 1:56 pm Post subject: Re: "empty" .keep files

I suspect that the .keep file will be present with keepdirs even when there are non-empty folders. Simply because unmerging the one package may remove an empty folder, which although now empty is still needed by another installed package.

dwyrm · n00b Joined: 13 Dec 2003 Posts: 19

I meant that the .keep file itself had some data in it. Looked like random binary garbage, but since I don't know quite how it got there, I left it.

tomk · Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2003 2:16 am Post subject:

All the .keep files I've seen have been empty, but I guess it doesn't matter as either way the file exists.
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dwyrm · n00b Joined: 13 Dec 2003 Posts: 19

orionrobots · Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2003 4:37 pm Post subject: Re: it bugs me anyway

You could always try and use a sacrificial installation of some package to find out- and let us know what happened.. Do something sensible like hide the original .keep under temp, with its full path as underscores or something... Then add a new zero length .keep file in its place... Then try do an emerge -u or something that would definately affect some files in the given folder...

And before I forget - post the results here...

linux_girl · Apprentice Joined: 12 Sep 2003 Posts: 287

.keep seem to be kernel stuff for fs . or to marke deadenddirs or sometin

or maybe its a tar trick to be able to creat dirs even empty one

eg:
/boot/.keep
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kezzla · Posted: Wed May 05, 2004 12:45 am Post subject:

.keep = tehsuX

# cat /usr/local/bin/rmkeep
#!/bin/bash
for i in `find / -name .keep`; do rm $i; done

linux_girl · Apprentice Joined: 12 Sep 2003 Posts: 287

teknomage1 · Posted: Wed May 05, 2004 12:51 am Post subject:

What's the point of nuking a 0 byte file?

kezzla · Posted: Wed May 05, 2004 1:29 am Post subject:

So I don't have to see junk files all over my filesystem !
:twisted:

sn4ip3r · Posted: Wed May 05, 2004 1:46 am Post subject:

teknomage1 · Posted: Wed May 05, 2004 2:03 am Post subject:

don't use ls -a and they won't show up

kezzla · Posted: Wed May 05, 2004 4:18 am Post subject:

Weird...I've been removing them for almost a year now via cron job that runs nightly...never had any problems ? ;-)

dabicho · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2004 Posts: 28 Location: México

kezzla · Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 6:37 am Post subject:

wow nice .. that was ridiculously thorough dabicho...thanks for the info :-)

ttuttle · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Oct 2004 Posts: 131

skill · n00b Joined: 15 Apr 2004 Posts: 9

chemmett · Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2004 5:28 am Post subject:

FWIW, I think those are a result of the gentoo developers using CVS. Unlike tar, CVS won't save and create empty directories.

dbrodie · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2004 Posts: 3

If you really want to keep them and are worried about the space, you could always hard- or soft- link all of them to a single .keep file...
Shouldn't be too difficult to do it with a simple script.