Arch Linux

Klepto

Member

From: Scotland

Registered: 2007-11-12

Posts: 41

Hello and a package management question [solved]

Hello Arch Linux people.

I'm a new Arch user, and a very happy one at that. It's a lovely distro you have here, strikes a nice balance between power and not spending all your time feeding and watering your Linux. I've used a fair few distros in my time, from Mandrake to LFS, but I expect I'll stay here for a while. For the last 3 years or so I've used Kubuntu, but coming from something deb based to Arch I though I'd minimalise my desktop too. As a result and after much trial and error over the last 2 days or so I have an Xfce based DE that I'm really happy with.

Now the question: with all the experimentation I've a whole bunch of stuff that was installed as dependencies that I no longer need. What's the easiest (safe) way to remove the junk? Can I use pacman -Rs without specifying a package, and will it trash my system? Normally I'd give it a try but in this instance some expert advice would be appreciated

Last edited by Klepto (2007-11-13 10:15:47)

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I'm a moderate, it's the mainstream that's extremist.

mucknert

Member

From: Berlin // Germany

Registered: 2006-06-27

Posts: 510

Re: Hello and a package management question [solved]

There is an option for pacman that shows all orphans. Read up in the manpage!

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Todays mistakes are tomorrows catastrophes.

Mikko777

Member

From: Suomi, Finland

Registered: 2006-10-30

Posts: 837

Re: Hello and a package management question [solved]

Is there?

Well install yaourt from aur, atleast it should have better checks for orphans and cleaning / merging pacsave files.

Also cleaning pacman cache can save gigs of space pacman -Scc.

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Ashren

Member

From: Denmark

Registered: 2007-06-13

Posts: 1,229

Website

Re: Hello and a package management question [solved]

pacman -Rsc <package> removes the package and all dependencies not used by other packages. After you've used this a bit, run pacman -Qe to check for ophans, then remove them.

Not exactly what you're asking for but it'll do the job.

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Use LVM2!

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Gilneas

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2006-10-22

Posts: 320

Re: Hello and a package management question [solved]

Phrakture has an application, pacorphans, that could be useful for locating items to delete, I'm not sure if pacman can do this.

Also, may be a bit risky - just an idea, 'pacman -Rcns xorg', and then 'pacman -S xorg xfce' etc...
Is this how -Rc is used? I've never actually used it myself.

Klepto

Member

From: Scotland

Registered: 2007-11-12

Posts: 41

Re: Hello and a package management question [solved]

Thanks for the help guys. It's pacman -Qe to display oprhans. I was so busy looking at removal options in pacman and yaourt I didn't think to check the query options, serves me right for staying up all night playing with eye candy

There may be a slicker way, but I wrote a little script to run as root...

#!/bin/bash

while [ "$(pacman -Qe)" ]
do
  for p in "$(pacman -Qe)"
  do
    pacman -R "${p%% *}"
  done
done

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I'm a moderate, it's the mainstream that's extremist.

digitalcrypto

Member

Registered: 2008-01-14

Posts: 21

Re: Hello and a package management question [solved]

If you've removed something like vlc and want to remove the orphans associated with it that didn't get removed you can alias the following:

pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)

Seems to work well without screwing everything else up.

thx: Shining