Andrew Reid wrote:
On Friday 16 November 2007 22:02, David Fox wrote:
On 11/16/07, Andrew Sackville-West
<andrew@farwestbilliards.com> wrote:
I think OP is looking for aptitude clean or
auto-clean. Check the man
page. It will remove debs that aren't current.
or something like that.
Actually, all that does is to remove either all
(clean) or selected
(auto-clean) - selected in the sense that they're
debs no longer
available. But it removes the debian packages in
/var/cache/apt/archives, not the actual packages
themselves.
[Common scenario elided]
I wonder if "deborphan" meets the OP's need?
It's a utility
that identifies "left over" packages that no other
packages
depend on. Library packages that meet this
description are
probably left-overs and can be removed.
See <http://packages.debian.org/etch/deborphan>
for more details.
-- A.
Perhaps the OP is referring to .deb packages
accumulating in
/var/cache/apt/archives. After many upgrades and
dist-upgrades there
will be quite a few old versions of many .deb files
that build up.
Also, uninstalled packages still leave their .deb
files in the
archives. I wrote a program a while back (in
Python) which handles this
for me, giving statistics on how many package .deb
files exist which are
not installed, or are duplicated in the archives.
It then gives options
for deleting them with, or without prompting. I
don't know of any
packaged program that does this, however. That's
why I wrote my own.
This is what the program shows when it is started
up:
----------------------------------------
CleanApt v0.4.0 - an apt cache cleaner
Total installed packages: 743 Total uninstalled
packages in
archive: 23
Total packages in archive: 765 Total files in
archive: 843
Packages in archive w/dups: 59 Files in archive
in dup
pkgs: 137
Delete uninstalled packages from archive (y/N/p/q)?
y
----------------------------------------
Running the program with -d will automatically
remove dup deb files
leaving only the one with the most recent date.
Using -h will, of
course, give a few screens of help on options and
usage.