How to remove "dpkg -l" line with "in" for unwanted i386 package on amd64 system?

Question

I will really appreciate your help with this.

When I run dpkg -l bash, I get this:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                   Version          Architecture     Description
+++-======================-================-================-=================================================
in  bash                   <none>           i386             (no description available)
ii  bash                   4.3-7ubuntu1.4   amd64            GNU Bourne Again SHell

When I now do bash --version, I get this:

GNU bash, version 4.2.0(1)-release (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law

I would like to remove this entry:

in  bash                   <none>           i386             (no description available)

Any help will be really appreciated.

Answer 1

What the Current State Is

Lines starting with in in the output of dpkg -l mean that a package is set to be installed, but not actually (yet) installed.

Assuming you're not installing the package right now, a command to uninstall it should set it to be uninstalled, preventing its installation and removing that line from the output of dpkg -l bash.

How to Fix It

One way to do that is to run: sudo apt-get remove bash:i386

But please make sure not to leave out the :i386. That identifies the package for removal as the 32-bit version of bash, which is the one you're saying you don't want and which is the one you probably don't need. You definitely do need bash for your architecture (amd64)--even if all users use a different interactive shell, many other packages in Ubuntu depend on it.

More details about the current situation, and the "remove" action:

The leading i means it's marked to be installed, so it does make sense to want to clear that line in the output of dpkg -l.

The purge action (as fkraiem suggested) should work fine too, though it's probably unnecessary (compared to remove). Purging a package consists of removal and also deletion of systemwide configuration files. The second letter for the package, in the output of dpkg -l, should be a c instead of an n if systemwide configuration files for the package existed.