apt-get purge
Derek Broughton
derek at pointerstop.ca
Tue Jan 6 18:52:35 UTC 2009
Alex Katebi wrote:
> Well I did try to remove the wrong package. But when it asked me about
> removing all other packages I thought that it is trying to clean uneeded
> packages not vital ones.
Unfortunately, from a linux point-of-view, those weren't vital - they were
only your Desktop packages :-) The command line would still work...
> gdm was borken because of readline5. I could not open a terminal. I
> would say that it is essential.
Neither would KDE or any X app, but I suppose the real key to "essential" is
that without the essential packages, it's impossible (or at least
exceedingly difficult) to recover. In your case, if you'd had a list of
previously installed packages, you could still have reinstalled them from
the command line (in fact, there's a fairly good chance that "sudo dpkg -i
/var/cache/apt/archives/*" would have done the job). Alternatively, do you
realize you should (I've never actually tried it) be able to parse out
everything you just deleted from /var/log/dpkg.log?
# egrep "[0123456789d- :]+ remove" /var/log/dpkg.log
should find all the recently removed packages - find where the first removed
package is (I'm not 100% sure it will be libreadline5) and delete everything
before that, then pipe the rest through
> cut -f 4 -d " " | dpkg --set-selections
Of course, as I said, I haven't tried this :-)
--
derek
More information about the ubuntu-users
mailing list