Purging removed packages

Removing old packages is something you—or your package manager—does all the time. That does, however, leave an awful amount of configuration files that should have been purged, right? This simple command will purge removed packages:

# dpkg -l | awk '/^rc/ {print $2}' | xargs dpkg --purge

I cannot remember where I got this command. I am sorry about not giving any credit.

This has been something I have been wondering about for a while. When a system ages there will nessesarily be left quite a few configuration files when old packages are removed. This simple command cleans out old packages for good.

The “debhelper” package is required.

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One comment

Now that is a really usefull command! Will have to test it later to night.

Comment by Kent Vegard Evjen (Subscribed) at 2008-06-18 @411.

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