Watch Out!

RPM takes most of the work out of removing software from your system, and that's great. As with everything else in life, however, there's a downside. RPM also makes it easy to erase packages that are critical to your system's continued operation. Here are some examples of packages not to erase:

• RPM: RPM will happily uninstall itself. No problem -- you'll just re-install it with rpm -i... Oops!

• Bash: The Bourne-again Shell may not be the shell you use, but certain parts of many Linux systems (like the scripts executed during system startup and shutdown) use /bin/sh, which is a symbolic link to /bin/bash. No /bin/bash, no /bin/sh. No /bin/sh, no system!

In many cases, RPM's dependency processing will prevent inadvertent erasures from causing massive problems. However, if you're not sure, use rpm -q to get more information about the package you'd like to erase.