In <[🔎] 878wkcdobs.fsf@gmail.com>, Rodolfo Medina wrote: >Suppose that I want to remove all the packages beginning with `texlive', > that are a lot in my system. > >If I do: `aptitude purge texlive*', the system complains that no package > has that name. Right, the shell performs "globbing", matching such patterns against pathnames and providing multiple arguments to the underlying command. As packages aren't accessible via pathnames, you can't count on your shell finding them. >How to do then? Aptitude itself uses regular expressions (I like PCRE, might just be posix- extended) to match against package properties paired with "atoms" or "operators" (I can't remember the correct terminology) to select which property or combine searches. In this case use the aptitude search string "~n^texlive" or simply "^texlive" since "~n" is the default. Since these aptitude search expressions can have characters in them that the shell interprets (e.g. *, ?, and [] all have special meaning in both regular expressions and shell "glob"s), you'll want to surround the expression in single-quotes to prevent the shell from interpreting it -- passing it directly to aptitude after removing the quotes. Something like: aptitude purge '^texlive' -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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