On Sunday 11 August 2013 10:39 AM, Dom wrote:
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 SNAFUhave 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.
Hi, As per the man pages: http://linuxreviews.org/man/dpkg/ dpkg -s <package-name>will give you the status of a package. As per the man file, it should show the status as "unpacked".
dpkg --purgeshould work as expected. To make sure that it does work as expected you can add add the --no-act option which will ensure that no changes are written.
caveat: Be sure to give --no-act before the action-parameter, or you might end up with undesirable results. (e.g. dpkg --purge foo --no-act will first purge package foo and then try to purge package --no-act, even though you probably expected it to actually do nothing)
Sincerely, Kailash