Re: Cleaning Up Alternatives

[Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 12:49:18PM +0300, David Baron wrote:
> /etc/alternatives has a zillion dangling symlinks. Seems these got set 
> somewhere along the line but were never cleaned up as programs were moved, 
> upgraded, removed.
> 
> How does one clean up this mess conveniently?
> 

I don't know about conveniently.  Dangling symlinks happen if you
overrode auto config with a manual selection then deleted the package
that it points to.  You need to revert those alternatives to auto mode.

I think you have to do this for each affected alternative; I don't see a
way to update-alternative --auto [--all-dangling].

So, if vi is a dangling symlink:

	update-alternatives --auto vi

will fix it.

Doug.