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Errors in executing /etc/cron.daily/rpm & hanging rpq processes

If you execute an rpm command and it hangs forever-ish, or you see you have a lot of dead/zombie/sleeping processed started nightly by cron and waiting on an rpm command - it's possible you have some temporary db files in /var/lib/rpm left over from a messy abort of a previous use of rpm.

Try deleting all the temp db's by doing:

$ rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
    

I also saw a note at http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/rpm_db3_error.html saying you might need to do rpm --rebuilddb to rebuild the database from the installed package headers, but I don't know what that really does.

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