Return to Revisions

Automatic packages that are no longer used are marked as "id" in aptitude.

I find three ways to remove them.

1. Aptitude UI

   sudo aptitude

   Press g to preview packages to be installed and removed.

   

   You can find those packages under "Packages being removed because they are no longer used". Then press g again, aptitude will remove those packages.

2. Aptitude command line with grep and xargs

   aptitude search ~i | grep ^id | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo aptitude purge -y

3. Aptitude command line with Aptitude::Delete-Unused option

   sudo aptitude -o Aptitude::Delete-Unused=1 install

   Option: Aptitude::Delete-Unused

   Default: true

   Description: If this option is true, automatically installed packages which are no longer required will be automatically removed. For more information, see the section called “Managing automatically installed packages”.

   I found this solution from http://www.lambdacurry.com/2013/12/aptitude-equivalent-of-apt-get-autoremove/. And the option is described in "Configuration file reference" in the aptitude reference manual. I don't have enough reputation to post more links, so you can search around for the document.

Either of them works for me.