Re: Dealing with obsolete packages

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 08:29:41AM +0100, Bob Cox <debian-user@lists.bobcox.com> was heard to say:
> > I know that aptitude gui interface can show all those obsolete packages 
> > by sections. my questions are:
> > 
> > - how can I tag all obsolete packages in a section, then remove them?
> > - how can I get such obsolete packages list on command line?

  [snip]

> To answer the first question, probably *something* like this:
> 
> for file in `aptitude search ~o | cut -b 5- | awk '{print $1}'`; do aptitude remove $file; done
> 
> although I am sure there are neater, more elegant solutions.

  For instance, you could do

    $ aptitude remove "~o~sSECTION"

  or just push "-" on the header of the group if you're using the
curses interface.

  Daniel