I’m running Gentoo boxes and the following commands help to keep the packages in order and clean.

I have added the following cron to my crontab to perform a sync on a regular basis so that I keep up to date.

sync gentoo updates

min[0-59] hour[0-23] day-of-month[1-31] month[1-12] day-of-week[0-6]

15 3 * * 1,3,5 root emerge –sync

This cron will run Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 3:15am. This saves me having to perform a sync manually.

Then I can perform an update when ever I want to knowing that the portage list is pretty much up to date, with out having to wait for a sync to happen.

emerge world -uva

The ‘-va’ options displays in verbose fashion all the USE flags that will be used for each package as well as prompting you to perform this emerge or not.

Then periodically I run the following commands to keep the system clean.

emerge –update –deep –newuse world -va

emerge –depclean

revdep-rebuild

See the Portage Introduction doc for complete information on portage.

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