Debian list of config files
4 Replies
Although if you have any sort of FAM (File Alternation Monitor), then you should easily find which files have been modified.
Probably, simply backing up /etc might work.
So it shouldn't be too hard to dump those checksums, and compare against the currently installed files to identify those that are different. A little experimenting this evening came up with this (all one line):
sed -n -e '/^Conffiles:/,/^[^ ]/ p' /var/lib/dpkg/status | awk '/^ / {print $2 " " $1}' | md5sum -c | grep FAILED
The sed extracts the config file lines (including one line above and below), and the awk turns just the checksum lines into a format compatible with md5sum (name, two spaces, then checksum), and then the md5sum does a comparison against its input.
I don't think this would include files that were moved into locations like /etc from default copies (like in /usr/share) if done during the post installation phase of a package install. But I think those processes use the ucf command, which keeps checksums in /var/lib/ucf/hashfile. That file is already in a format compatible with md5sum, so a simple "md5sum -c /var/lib/ucf/hashfile | grep FAILED" should be fine for that.
Sort of manual, but should go a long way to identifying those configuration files that you've modified in a current install.
– David