Over on the Fediverse, I shared a somewhat unwelcome discovery I made after upgrading to Fedora 42 :

This is my face when I have quite a few binaries in /usr/sbin on my office Fedora desktop that aren't owned by any package. Presumably they were once owned by packages, but the packages got removed without the files being removed with them, which isn't supposed to happen.

(My office Fedora install has been around for almost 20 years now without being reinstalled, so things have had time to happen. But some of these binaries date from 2021.)

There seem to be two sorts of these lingering, unowned /usr/sbin programs. One sort, such as /usr/sbin/getcaps, seems to have been left behind when its package moved things to /usr/bin, possibly due to this RPM bug ( via ). The other sort is genuinely unowned programs dating to anywhere from 2007 (at the oldest) to 2021 (at the newest), which have nothing else left of them sitting around. The newest programs are what I believe are wireless management programs: iwconfig, iwevent, iwgetid, iwlist, iwpriv, and iwspy, and also "ifrename" (which I believe was also part of a 'wireless-tools' package). I had the wireless-tools package installed on my office desktop until recently, but I removed it some time during Fedora 40, probably sparked by the /sbin to /usr/sbin migration, and it's possible that binaries didn't get cleaned up properly due to that migration.

The most interesting orphan is /usr/sbin/sln, dating from 2018, when apparently various people discovered it as an orphan on their system. Unlike all the other orphan programs, the sln manual page is still shipped as part of the standard 'man-pages' package and so you can read sln(8) online. Based on the manual page, it sounds like it may have been part of glibc at one point.

(Another orphaned program from 2018 is pam_tally , although it's coupled to pam_tally2.so, which did get removed.)

I don't know if there's any good way to get mappings from files to RPM packages for old Fedora versions. If there is, I'd certainly pick through it to try to find where various of these files came from originally. Unfortunately I suspect that for sufficiently old Fedora versions, much of this information is either offline or can't be processed by modern versions of things like dnf.

(The basic information is used by eg 'dnf provides' and can be built by hand from the raw RPMs, but I have no desire to download all of the RPMs for decade-old Fedora versions even if they're still available somewhere. I'm curious but not that curious.)

PS: At the moment I'm inclined to leave everything as it is until at least Fedora 43, since RPM bugs are still being sorted out here. I'll have to clean up genuinely orphaned files at some point but I don't think there's any rush. And I'm not removing any more old packages that use '/sbin/<whatever>', since that seems like it has some bugs.