Sam Halliday wrote:
well i could easily use aptitude to purge packages... but since that is a pain if i have more than 5 packages which i uninstalled, i'd prefer to use a scripted approach. it's all too easy to type - instead of _, especially since _ on a packge will only - its dependencies.
That you mention '-' and '_', I assume you are using aptitude in interactive (GUI) mode. Use the non-interactive mode:
# aptitude purge ~cThis will removed packages which are uninstalled, but still have configuration files (not purged). As I understand it, this is what you asked for.
From /usr/share/doc/aptitude/README:
~c
Matches packages which have been removed, but whose configuration
files remain on the system (ie, they were removed but not purged).
If you have installed the packages with "aptitude install" in the first
place, then automatically installed dependencies will be removed as
well. Even if you didn't install the packages with aptitude, you can use
"aptitude markauto" to manually specify automatically installed packages.
dircha