Yum Warning: There Are Unfinished Transactions Remaining, You Might Consider Running Yum-Complete-Transaction First To Finish Them

During the build of a Linux development server earlier I performed a “yum update” to update all of the packages after installing CentOS 5.4. I got busy with other tasks and left the server at work without checking to verify that the update had worked properly. Now after dinner I started to get back to work on the server by installing some new packages via yum and received a yum warning message which I describe in greater detail below along with how to resolve the warning.

CentOS Linux Yum Warning Message:

The above message showed up near the top of the output of “yum remove sendmail” and after testing it turns out that the message displays on any yum command that is issued to this server. I assume that earlier when issuing a yum update things did not complete correctly thus leaving some unfinished transactions. Resolving this issue is easy enough though by installing the “yum-utils” package and then running yum-complete-transaction.

Install Yum-Utils Using The Yum Package Manager:

As you can see above even when installing the yum-utils package a warning displays about unfinished transactions. The yum-utils package includes numerous yum tools such as yum-complete-transaction, yumdownloader, yum-builddep, yum-debug-dump, and yum-groups-manager. These tools can all be helpful in troubleshooting any yum errors or warnings. Below is the output of running the yum-complete-transactions which simply looks for transactions that were not completed properly and then finishes the yum transaction. As you will see in the output below the packages had all been installed but for some reason the transaction did not close out. There are a ton of packages since I was running yum update for the first time.

CentOS Linux: yum-complete-transaction Output:

Now when running yum commands on this server I do not receive the warning message about yum transactions that need to be completed. The yum-complete-transaction application first checks for incomplete yum transactions, list the number of incomplete yum transactions, list the number of elements per transaction, complete the transactions, and then clean up the now completed yum transaction.