When you install an update to a package on an RPM-based system, any configuration files which were originally distributed by the package and that have been changed are not replaced when the package is updated. Instead, rpm creates a new file with the extention " .rpmnew ". It is then necessary to manually compare the existing file and the new one and decide how to deal with the new file. So, the pattern I often need to use is "list all .rpmnew files and the corresponding original file". This is not a particularly complex issue, but is one that I don't use often enough to have at my fingertips. The trick is bash variable substitution; specifically pattern matching: ${variable%pattern} . This deletes the shortest possible match for pattern from the right of the contents of $variable . An example using .rpmnew files created when upgading OpenNMS: # ls -1 *.rpmnew| while read f ; do ls -l ${f%\.rpmnew}* ; done -rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 7285 Jun 3 12:43 data...