[ILUG] possibly useful script

[Padraig Finnerty]

Here's a short script prints out the size of each rpm that you have 
installed (as from 'rpm -qa').  Its output is useful for piping through 
'sort -rn' so you can see what packages are taking up the most space, maybe 
with an eye to removing some of them.

------------
#! /bin/sh

rpms=`rpm -qa`
for rpm in $rpms
do
   size=`rpm -qi $rpm |grep "^Size" |sed -e 's/[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\).*/\1/'`
   printf "%-20s%s\n" $size $rpm
done
------------

A quick question on the script, specifically about the line: rpms=`rpm -qa`
What's the limit of characters you can store in a variable?
Would I have had more space if I had done:

for rpm in `rpm -qa`

or are they effectively the same thing?

Padraig