I have a little gem I figured I’d share with the masses. I just ran through updating my Gentoo ~amd64 system (many many updates in the last 6 months) and found that there were still packages that had not been updated. I threw together a quick shell command to not only find all packages out of date but update them as well:

eix | grep '\[U' | perl -e '@p=<>;map{s/\[U\](.*)\n//;$i.=$1;}@p;print $i;' | xargs emerge -uD

So if you use the eix tool to greatly speedup package lookups, it’s output can be utilized to find packages that were not picked up by a recent emerge -uD world. The perl script most definately could be golfed further but I’d like to keep things readable.