Table of Contents


Generating Lists of Currently Installed Packages

There are two methods to generate packages to weed through. The first method outputs all packages, including their file size, to a text file. The other is a direct output directly to the console.

Via list

dpkg --get-selections | cut -f1 | while read pkg; do dpkg -L $pkg | xargs -I'{}' bash -c 'if [ ! -d "{}" ]; then echo "{}"; fi' | tr'\n' '\000' | du -c --files0-from - | tail -1 | sed "s/total/$pkg/"; done | sort -rn > ~/packages.log.txt

Via output to console

dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -n


Cleaning up Packages and their Configurations

When removing applications, there are usually configurations leftover. In most cases, you want to remove everything. This can be done by doing a purge on the application when removing. If this has not been done, you can do the following to cleanup:

  1. Check for applications that have configurations left behind:

    dpkg --list | grep '^rc\b'

  2. Now you can to a dpkg -P for each individual package, or if you wish to purge everything in the list, you can run the following command: 

    dpkg --list | grep '^rc\b' | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs dpkg -P

  3. To finish, you run the following commands to finalize the cleanup, and sync of apt-cache and lists: 

    apt autoremove
apt clean

Manually Uninstall Package

mv /var/lib/dpkg/info/PACKAGE.* /tmp/
dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq PACKAGE
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