Date: 2009nov20 OS: RedHat/Fedora/CentOS Q. Oh no! my rpm database is corrupt and rpm and not do anything. How can I recover it? A. The first thing to try is:

rpm --rebuilddb

But if that doesn't work, as a last resort you can notice that almost every package makes a folder in /usr/share/doc Doing:

ls /usr/share/doc

is almost the same as using rpm to list your current packages! So again, as a last restore (don't blame me if it blows up your machine), you can do:

rpm --initdb

cd /usr/share/doc

dnf install `/bin/ls`

I actually did this once and it didn't turn out too badly. If you find out a better way please leave a comment.