Repair the RPM databaseRevisionas of Thursday, 28 May 2026 at 13:06 UTC

I had a problem with running a yum update on some package. The process would sleep indefinitely. A clue that something was wrong with the RPM database (at /var/lib/rpm) was that running rpm -qa would hang as well.

The solution is to rebuild the RPM database. In short:

# Backups!
tar -czvf /tmp/rpm.tgz /var/lib/rpm

# Remove the database locks
rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*

# Rebuild!
rpm -vv --rebuilddb

That should do it.