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battra

Member

From: Earth.US.Illinois.Chicago

Registered: 2006-05-12

Posts: 71

pacman: cascade vs. recursive (SOLVED)

Sorry, I read the pacman man page, but am still a little confused on the differences between the two Remove options:  cascade(-c) and recursive(-s).

Can someone dumb this down for me?

For example, why wouldn't recursive (-s) be able to remove groups like gnome (as I've heard it can't)?  Is it always safe to do 'pacman -Rcs'?

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"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
- Socrates

Cerebral

Forum Fellow

From: Waterloo, ON, CA

Registered: 2005-04-08

Posts: 3,108

Website

Re: pacman: cascade vs. recursive (SOLVED)

Here's an example:

package A depends on package B.
package B depends on package C.
(so, diagrammatically, A -> B -> C)

pacman -Rs A

will remove A, B, C. *

pacman -Rc A

will remove A.

pacman -Rs C

will complain that B depends on C, and won't remove anything.

pacman -Rc C

will remove A, B, and C.

Basically, -Rs goes one way down the dependency chain (remove this package, and everything it depends on *), and -Rc goes the other way (remove this package, and everything that depends on it).

-Rsc removes the package, all of its dependencies *, and all packages that depend on it.

* -Rs only removes dependencies if they're not needed by some other package. So if A and B both depend on C, then pacman -Rs A will not remove C.

battra

Member

From: Earth.US.Illinois.Chicago

Registered: 2006-05-12

Posts: 71

Re: pacman: cascade vs. recursive (SOLVED)

I understand now.  Thanks so much.

---

"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
- Socrates