Re: How to reduce a debian system to a base system
On Fri March 19 2010 12:55:47 Mike Viau wrote:
> I was looking for a way to purge or remove all the packages that were
> installed on a Debian system after the initial (bare bone) minimal system
> installation. I have searched on Google for "How to reduce a Debian system
> to a base system" but it seems like the topic of interest was to reduce the
> memory consumption of the installed system, which is not my consern.
>
> In essence I would like to revert my system back to a freshly installed
> state, without reinstalling. Ultimatly is this possible?
Assuming your bare bones --get-selections file is called bbs:
dpkg --dry-run --purge $(join -v2 <(awk '{if ($2=="install") print $1}' <bbs |
sort) <(dpkg --get-selections | awk '{if ($2=="install") print $1}' | sort))
Remove "--dry-run" at your own peril once you're happy with the proposed
actions.
You may need to run it a couple or three times but that should do it.
--Mike Bird
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