Re: How to recover after unintentional 'dpkg --unpack' ? (was ... Re: Dpkg SNAFU was Re: Oops!)

[Dom <toyer@rpdom.net>]

On 11/08/13 03:43, Patrick Bartek wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Aug 2013, Chris Bannister wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 06:13:20PM +0100, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> > > Changing subject as suggested by Chris, and reposting original
> > > question.
> > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Still an unhelpful question, esp when one knows the true meaning of
> > SNAFU
> >
> > > have resulted in Gnome being install, too.  More or less.  So I
> > > just did as root in /root a 'dpkg --download,' and then an
> > > '--unpack' thinking that would uncompress the .deb file in /root
> > > from which I would get the single svg file I needed, and then just
> > > delete everything else.  Simple. Right?  Wrong. Now, I'm stuck with
> > > about 4.5 megs of Gnome data, icons,
> >
> > AFAIU, a .deb file is just an 'ar' archive.
> >
> > As to how to recover after an unintentional unpack, ... dunno.
> > Hopefully someone on this list knows now that the subject explains
> > your predicament.
>
> Fortunately --unpack just "installed" files to their appropriate
> directories, but didn't "trigger" or configure anything.  Not all that
> up on dpkg. Have always used apt-get.
>
> If I don't hear anything bad to the contrary in the next day or so, I'm
> just going to use "--purge" to remove the package after creating
> a copy of the file I need in a safe directory, then copy the copy back
> after the purging.  Hopefully, it will work.

Good luck with that, it sounds like it will work.

Alternatively you can get a list of the files contained in the .deb file 
using "dpkg -c debfile". With a little bit of wrangling that will give 
you a list of files and directories to delete - although you should only 
delete directories if they are empty.

--
Dom