Remove all development libraries

Question

I've built a few apps from source which required development libraries. And when I installed them, they installed more -dev dependencies.

Now I want to remove those libraries.

The command sudo apt-get purge lib*-dev can do any harm to my Ubuntu installation?

Are there any development libraries included in a fresh install of Ubuntu? If there are, should I keep them?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 01 '14 at 20:38

3

Basically, you don't need any development libraries to run your system. As the name says, they are for development purposes. The libraries used to run these applications are different ones.

Your command looks fine to me, but anyway APT is giving you a list with the packages to be removed. Just watch it for packages you need (everything without the -dev would be suspicious)

answered May 01 '14 at 20:38

s3lph

14,314
11
59
82

Yes, I know the apps don't need them anymore after they are built. – Cornelius May 01 '14 at 20:39
1

Also APT will warn you if you may destroy your system. ("You are about to do something potentially dangerous....") – s3lph May 01 '14 at 20:40

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 08 '22 at 12:37

1

Token from https://askubuntu.com/a/1277984/1621404

This removes everything with "-dev" in name,

sudo apt list --installed -a '*-dev' | grep "^[^\ ]*/" -o | sed 's/\///' | xargs -I '{}' sudo apt remove -y '{}'

answered Aug 08 '22 at 12:37

zen2818

11
2

Remove all development libraries

2 Answers2