Re: Cleaning Up Alternatives

["Kushal Kumaran" <kushal.kumaran+debian@gmail.com>]

On 5/23/07, Wayne Topa <linuxone@intergate.com> wrote:
> Mike McClain(mike.mcclain@nowhere.net) is reported to have said:
> > 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.
>
> Thanks for this jewel Mike!  I am still trying to grok the " -f2.

It's easy enough.  -d" " sets the delimiter to space instead of the
default TAB, and -f2 selects the second field according to that
delimiter.  See the cut(1) manpage.

Try running the pipeline without the final cut to see.

--
Kushal