Saturday·09·April·2011
Finding packages for deinstallation on the commandline with aptitude //at 20:18 //by abe
Although I often don’t agree with Erich (especially if GNOME is involved ;-), he recently posted something on Planet Debian which I found very helpful.
I also own a netbook where disk space is sacre. It’s an ASUS EeePC 701 with just 4GB disk space. And it runs Debian Sid, so dependencies change often, leaving packages installed which formerly had hard dependencies on, but are now left with just recommendations pointing to it.
Quite a few times I asked myself if it’s possible to find those packages and if so, how to do it. Well, I don’t have to ask myself that anymore, since Erich recently posted the appropriate filter patterns for my favourite package manager aptitude for this task in his posting “Finding packages for deinstallation”. Thanks, Erich!
Since those filters aren’t very easy to remember, I’d like to extend the usefulness of his posting towards the commandline. I for myself added the following aliases to my shell setup:
alias aptitude-just-recommended='aptitude -o "Aptitude::Pkg-Display-Limit=!?reverse-depends(~i) ~M !?essential"' alias aptitude-also-via-dependency='aptitude -o "Aptitude::Pkg-Display-Limit=~i !~M ?reverse-depends(~i) !?essential"'
As youam suggested on
IRC, I also added the filter !?essential since we won’t
touch essential packages when cleaning up the list of installed
packages anyway.
Hope this helps further.
Tagged as: aptitude, CLI, Debian, filter, nemo, Netbook, Other Blogs, Package Management, pattern, Planet Debian, UUUCO, youam
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