Hi, Dave, You raise good points. I shall do my best to answer them, but first I would very much like to hear your thoughts on... What are the responsibilities of pacman regarding managed directories versus files/links? The mtrees enable -Qkk to report altered files/links. But what things should count as altered for dirs? Is it only (as currently implemented) the removal of the entire dir? Why doesn't adding to a dir count as an alteration? So I don't feel my proposal is fairly characterized as having pacman deal with files it is not responsible for. It owns those managed dirs and is responsible for them. It knows exactly what it put into those dirs, and any additions constitute a divergence of the filesystem from pacman's database image of it. There are 3 implementations if you count the original "pacman-disowned". But they all fail to meet the requirements of the scenario I described previously. You've mentioned the longish run time for this feature, and that is in fact motivation for including it in the pacman binary. Any external script would need to invoke pacman three times (-Ql, -Qk, -Qkk) in order to meet the requirements. It does not seem advantageous to force the user to wait three times longer than necessary. Looking forward to your response, Jeremy