Re: How to recover after unintentional 'dpkg --unpack' ? (was ... Re: Dpkg SNAFU was Re: Oops!)
On Sun, 11 Aug 2013, 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
> >> 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.
I did that. Quite a long list. Too long (and too much trouble) to
manually delete the files and/or directories. Even thought of
building a script that used the list to automate it. But one little
mistake and my system could be trashed. Safer to just use --purge.
Thanks for your advice.
B
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