How To Delete Packages by Pattern in Ubuntu with APT and Aptitude

In this article, we will explore how to delete packages by pattern in Ubuntu using two popular package management tools: APT (Advanced Package Tool) and Aptitude. Both tools are powerful and offer various ways to manage packages, including the ability to delete packages based on a specific pattern.

Understanding APT and Aptitude

APT and Aptitude are command-line tools used in Debian and Ubuntu systems for handling packages. They allow you to install, update, upgrade, and remove software packages. While APT is more commonly used, Aptitude provides a more flexible pattern matching system which can be advantageous in certain scenarios.

Deleting Packages with APT

APT allows you to delete packages using the remove or purge commands. The remove command deletes the package but leaves configuration files, while purge removes everything including configuration files.

Here is a basic example of how to delete a package using APT:

sudo apt-get remove packageName

To delete packages by pattern, you can use regular expressions. For instance, to remove all packages that contain the string “libreoffice”, you could use:

sudo apt-get remove 'libreoffice.*'

In this command, libreoffice.* is a regular expression that matches any package name containing the string “libreoffice” followed by any number of characters.

Deleting Packages with Aptitude

Aptitude offers a powerful pattern matching system, which can be used to delete packages by pattern. Here is the basic syntax for removing a package:

sudo aptitude remove packageName

To remove packages by pattern, you can use a query, as in this example:

sudo aptitude remove '?and(?name(libreoffice), ~i)'

In this command, ?and(?name(libreoffice), ~i) is a query that matches any installed package with “libreoffice” in its name.

Advanced Pattern Matching

For more complex scenarios, you can use advanced pattern matching. For instance, you can use dpkg, grep, awk, and xargs to list all installed packages, filter those matching a certain pattern, extract the package names, and then run the purge command on each package:

dpkg -l | grep libreoffice | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -n1 sudo apt-get purge -y

In this command, dpkg -l lists all installed packages, grep libreoffice filters for those matching “libreoffice”, awk '{print $2}' extracts the package names, and xargs -n1 sudo apt-get purge -y runs the purge command on each package.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve explored how to delete packages by pattern in Ubuntu using APT and Aptitude. Remember to exercise caution when removing packages and always review the list of packages before executing the command. Some commands may require administrative privileges (sudo).

For more information on APT and Aptitude, you can check their man pages by typing man apt or man aptitude in the terminal, or visit their official documentation at APT and Aptitude respectively.