How can I check from the command line if a reboot is required on RHEL or CentOS?

Question

I'm using CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a few machines without the GUI. How can I check if recently installed updates require a reboot? In Ubuntu, I'm used to checking if /var/run/reboot-required is present.

Answer 1

You could compare the ouput of uname -a with the list of installed kernel packages

Answer 2

About comparing installed kernels with running one:

#!/bin/bash
LAST_KERNEL=$(rpm -q --last kernel | perl -pe 's/^kernel-(\S+).*/$1/' | head -1)
CURRENT_KERNEL=$(uname -r)

test $LAST_KERNEL = $CURRENT_KERNEL || echo REBOOT

Hope that helps!

Answer 3

install.log install.log.syslog yum.log you check this place what all got new rpm got install

Answer 4

Check whether running kernel is the latest one.

If it's not, check whether system was restarted since kernel install.

If it was not, reboot.

CURRENT_KERNEL="$(rpm -q kernel-$(uname -r))"
test -z "$CURRENT_KERNEL" && exit 0     # Current kernel is a custom kernel

LATEST_KERNEL="$(rpm -q kernel | tail -1)"
test -z "$LATEST_KERNEL" && exit 0      # No kernel package installed

LATEST_KERNEL_INSTALLTIME=$(rpm -q kernel --qf "%{INSTALLTIME}\n" | tail -1)
test -z "$LATEST_KERNEL_INSTALLTIME" && exit 1      # Error reading INSTALLTIME

test "$CURRENT_KERNEL" = "$LATEST_KERNEL" && exit 0 # Latest kernel running, no reboot needed

BOOTTIME="$(sed -n '/^btime /s///p' /proc/stat)"
test -z "$BOOTTIME" && exit 1           # Error reading BOOTTIME

test "$LATEST_KERNEL_INSTALLTIME" -lt "$BOOTTIME" && exit 1 # Latest kernel not running, but system was restarted already
                                        # User switched back to an old kernel?

echo reboot