Any FreeBSD user that utilizes the ports system should be reading /usr/ports/UPDATING after every ports tree update and certainly before they update any port. It amazes me the number of problems people encounter that could be easily answered or avoided if they just grepped through that file for the name of the port they were having trouble with.

Over time you are bound to have ports installed that you no longer need. These may be things that you installed and no longer use, or ports that were depended on by another and remain after you have removed the parent port. No matter how they get there, after some length of time you are bound to have ports installed that you no longer need. A quick and easy way to identify ports that are not depended upon by other ports is to use pkg-orphan.

Today I'm going to share with you the quick and easy way to keep your ports tree updated in FreeBSD. We'll also look at updating the ports themselves.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the cvsup and portupgrade utilities installed. You can find them at /usr/ports/net/cvsup-without-gui and /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade. Now that you have made sure those are installed, you need to create a ports-supfile. I like to keep mine at /usr/local/etc/ports-supfile, so I'll assume you will keep yours there as well. Fire up your favorite editor and edit the file to look like: