Quote Originally Posted by CrashedAgain

Apt-get update I understand but what are the perl lines?
It simply comments each line in sources.list

Why rm /halt & /reboot??
Presumably to restore the proper state of the system but not really sure on that as I have no such directories. Do you?

What is this? I see there is a /etc/sysconfig/provider file on the system, it appears to have specifics about somebody's (Klaus'?) ISP. But why are these directories being made in this cleanup script?
Needed for the ISDN config tool from RH. Not sure if it's still necessary or not.

Why zero /var/log et al when they has just been nuked?..
Well 'nuke' is not a bash command so I have no idea what that does. Of course zero is to set the length of files to zero.

It looks like this will remove expanded manpages if there is a zipped version on the system. Am I reading this right?
Indeed

Man updatedb says it updates the slocate dateabase used for locating files. but what is dlocatedb...there is no man entry. Is it possibly a misprint & should read 'update -locatedb' ? Also, man updatedb says nothing about a --prunepaths option but seems to accept it if you try it.

Thanks.
Nope not a misprint, dlocate is an alternative to dpkg -L and dpkg -S
From man updatedb:
--prunepaths='path1 path2...'
Directories to not put in the database, which would otherwise
be. The environment variable PRUNEPATHS also sets this value.
Default is /tmp /usr/tmp /var/tmp /afs.