Re: The size of debian packages

[Bruce Stephens <bruce+debian@cenderis.demon.co.uk>]

Andrew Lyon <lyon@hep.man.ac.uk> writes:

> Since installing Debian in May the amount of disk space required for
> my OS has risen from 1.5GB to 3GB and has reached the limit of the
> partition.  I don't really want to allocate any more space to the OS
> as I'm sure there must be stuff there that I do not need or use (I
> admit to running dselect a little to liberally in the past!). How
> can I find out the sizes of the packages and try to establish what I
> can remove without disaster. I tried using deborphan to do this but
> it didn't even put a dent in my 100% full volume.

You might try debfoster.  synaptic makes it pretty easy to see your
installed packages, sorted in order of size.

This script shows installed packages together with their installed
size:

#!/bin/sh
gawk 'BEGIN {RS=""; FS="\n"}
         $2~/ installed/ {
                split($1, pkg, " ");
                split($5, size, " ");
                print pkg[2], size[2];}' /var/lib/dpkg/status

I call it "installed".  Then things like "installed | sort -n -k 2 |
less" can be useful.

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