How to remove Debian packages with help of vi magic

Posted by Christian Rößner on 23. October 2011 Leave a comment (0) Go to comments

Okay, the headline is not really the full truth, but with the help of vi you can do some cool things.

I had installed “graphviz” on one of my servers, because I thought I could create a dot file. For some reason [...] that did not work and so I decided to remove this package again. I wanted it really clean.

Normally someone would just do something like

apt-get autoremove –purge graphviz

but sometimes that does not remove all previously installed dependencies.

All package stuff gets logged to /var/log/apt/history.log. At least here on Ubuntu Lucid

So you may find a block like the following one:

Start-Date: 2011-10-23 14:41:00
Install: libts-0.0-0 (1.0-7build1), xfonts-encodings (1.0.3-1), ttf-dejavu-core (2.30-2), ttf-liberation (1.05.2.20091019-4), libcairo2 (1.8.10-2ubuntu1), xfonts-utils (7.5+2), libthai-data (0.1.13-1build1), libdirectfb-1.2-0 (1.2.8-5ubuntu2), libdatrie1 (0.2.2-3), fontconfig (2.8.0-2ubuntu1), libxfont1 (1.4.1-1ubuntu0.1), libpango1.0-common (1.28.0-0ubuntu2.2), libpixman-1-0 (0.16.4-1ubuntu2), libxaw7 (1.0.7-1), libgraphviz4 (2.20.2-8ubuntu3), libxft2 (2.1.14-1ubuntu1), fontconfig-config (2.8.0-2ubuntu1), libice6 (1.0.6-1), libthai0 (0.1.13-1build1), libxmu6 (1.0.5-1), libxpm4 (3.5.8-1), libxrender1 (0.9.5-1), x-ttcidfont-conf (32), libfontenc1 (1.0.5-1), libjpeg62 (6b-15ubuntu1), tsconf (1.0-7build1), x11-common (7.5+5ubuntu1), libsysfs2 (2.1.0-6), libfontconfig1 (2.8.0-2ubuntu1), libpango1.0-0 (1.28.0-0ubuntu2.2), libsm6 (1.1.1-1), libxcb-render0 (1.5-2), libxt6 (1.0.7-1), defoma (0.11.10-4ubuntu1), graphviz (2.20.2-8ubuntu3), libxcb-render-util0 (0.3.6-1build1), libgd2-noxpm (2.0.36~rc1~dfsg-3.1ubuntu1)
End-Date: 2011-10-23 14:41:10

Simply copy this code into a file and open it with vi. Now type the following command:

:%s/\( ([\.0-9a-z\-+~]\+),\?\)//g

Remove the Install: and the Start and End line. Save it.

Now:

cat filename | xargs apt-get autoremove --purge -y

No guarantees, have fun…

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