2

I needed to reinstall wine from scratch so I first decided to uninstall the current version but, running the command

sudo apt-cache pkgnames wine

before and after running any of: 

sudo apt-cache --purge remove wine1.4
sudo apt-cache --purge remove wine1.6
sudo apt-cache --purge remove wine1.7

results in the same lists of packages, so how do i know that executing apt-cache remove actually has uninstalled the package I commanded?

also should'nt the --purge option imply complete removal of wine (including wine1.7-dbg, wine1.7dev and several other files)?

muru
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FreakAtNs
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2 Answers2

2

The correct command to remove a package is, e.g.

sudo apt-get --purge remove wine1.4

and NOT

sudo apt-cache --purge remove wine1.4

--purge doesn't remove other packages, if the other packages don't depend on this package.

The command sudo apt-cache pkgnames wine prints only known packages and not the installation status:

From man apt-cache, 

pkgnames [prefix]
    This command prints the name of each package APT knows.
    The optional argument is a prefix match to filter the name list. The
    output is suitable for use in a shell tab complete function and
    the output is generated extremely quickly. This command is best used with
    the --generate option.

To show the installation status, you could use apt-cache policy:

$ apt-cache policy wine
wine:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 1:1.7.44-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
     1:1.7.44-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-wine/ppa/ubuntu/ wily/main amd64 Packages
     1:1.6.2-0ubuntu10 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ wily/universe amd64 Packages

or dpkg -l

$ dpkg -l | grep wine
rc  wine1.6                                     1:1.6.2-0ubuntu10                        amd64        Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (Binary Emulator and Library)
rc  wine1.6-amd64                               1:1.6.2-0ubuntu10                        amd64        Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (64-bit support)
rc  wine1.6-i386:i386                           1:1.6.2-0ubuntu10                        i386         Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (32-bit support)
ii  wine1.7                                     1:1.7.44-0ubuntu1                        amd64        Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (Binary Emulator and Library)
ii  wine1.7-amd64                               1:1.7.44-0ubuntu1                        amd64        Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (64-bit support)
ii  wine1.7-i386:i386                           1:1.7.44-0ubuntu1                        i386         Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (32-bit support)
ii  winetricks                                  0.0+20141009+svn1208-2ubuntu1            all          Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (winetricks)
cl-netbox
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A.B.
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1

Paraphrasing from apt-get's man page:

   purge is identical to remove except that configuration files are deleted too.

It won't delete more or fewer packages than a plain remove would.

But to remove other packages which were installed as dependencies you can run this command afterwards:

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove

Quoting from the man page again:

   autoremove
       autoremove is used to remove packages that were automatically
       installed to satisfy dependencies for other packages and are now no
       longer needed.
joeytwiddle
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