NAME
checkrestart - check which processes need to be restarted after an upgrade
SYNOPSIS
checkrestart
DESCRIPTION
The
checkrestart
program tries to determine if there are processes in the system
that need to be restarted after a system upgrade. This is necessary since an upgrade
will usually bring new system libraries and running processes will be still
using the old versions of the libraries. In stable Debian GNU/Linux
systems this is typically needed to eliminate a system exposure to a
vulnerability which might have been fixed by upgrading a library which that
process makes use of.
Consequently,
checkrestart
is sometimes used as an audit tool to find outdated versions of libraries in use,
particularly after security upgrades. Administrators should not, however, rely
on its output completely (see BUGS below).
This script needs to run as root in order to obtain the information it needs
for analysis.
EXIT STATUS
The program will exit with error (1) if a non-root user tries to run it. Otherwise,
it will always exit with error status 0.
BUGS
This program might fail if the output of the lsof utility changes since it
depends on it to detect which deleted files are used by processes. It might
also output some false positives depending on the processes' behaviour since
it does not check yet if the (deleted) files in use are really libraries.
Checkrestart
is also sensitive to the kernel version in use. And might fail to work with newer
(or older) versions.
A rewrite to make it less dependant on lsof could improve this, however.
SEE ALSO
lsof(8)
AUTHOR
checkrestart
was written by Matt Zimmerman for the Debian
GNU/Linux distribution.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE
Copyright (C) 2001 Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.
On Debian systems, a copy of the GNU General Public License may be
found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.
