Bug#476075: Behavior is described by the manual

[Michael Johnson <mjohnson@pitsco.com>]

I believe this behavior is as-designed. From the manual:

remove is identical to install except that packages are removed instead of installed. If a plus sign is appended to the package name (with no intervening space), the identified package will be installed instead of removed.


The description for install includes this paragraph:

If no package matches the given expression and the expression contains one of '.', '?' or '*' then it is assumed to be a POSIX regular expression, and it is applied to all package names in the database. Any matches are then installed (or removed). Note that matching is done by substring so 'lo.*' matches 'how-lo' and 'lowest'. If this is undesired, anchor the regular expression with a '^' or '$' character, or create a more specific regular expression.

So, 'open*' would match anything that has 'ope' followed by zero or more 'n' characters in the name.

Michael

-- 
Michael Johnson < mjohnson@pitsco.com >
Internet Application Programmer & Product Server Administrator
Pitsco, Inc.