re: Cleaning Up Alternatives

[Mike McClain <mike.mcclain@nowhere.net>]

On Tue, 22 May 2007, David Baron <d_baron@012.net.il> 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?

If these leftovers are due to packages removed but not purged, this
will tell you:
    grep -B1 "Status: deinstall ok config-files" /var/lib/dpkg/status \
        | grep "Pac" | cut -d" " -f2
and
    for f in $( the above line ); do dpkg -P $f; done
will clean up.

HTH,
Mike

As always this advice comes with a money back guarantee.
Mc.