Re: How to recover after unintentional 'dpkg --unpack' ? (was ... Re: Dpkg SNAFU was Re: Oops!)
On Sun, 11 Aug 2013, Kailash wrote:
> 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 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.
> >
> 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".
Did this first thing after the "unpack." Status is "installed"
however. Don't know why.
>
> dpkg --purge
>
> should 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.
Sometimes things don't work as expected, but "purge" seems the best
option to "clean" my system of the unneeded files/directories.
Yes, I was going to use "--no-act" (or similar) with verbose output to
check for problems before doing it for real.
>
> 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)
Thanks. That point is made in the dpkg man file. After the initial
unpack snafu, I read the man more thoroughly.
Thanks for your advice.
B
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