Log of all dependencies installed with a package

Question

I installed xinit and ubuntu-desktop on my web server as an experiment. I want to remove them, so I ran apt-get autoremove for each of them. Much less space was freed than was used in installation. I was going to remove all the packages, but my terminal won't scroll up far enough to see the dependencies that were also installed. Is there a record of which dependencies were installed, so that I can remove them? If not, is there a general list of dependencies? I hadn't installed much before that besides apache and some python packages, so maybe there's a list of which packages I should remove? I used nearly 2.5% of my available 20GB installing these.

Did you run sudo apt-get clean or sudo apt-get autoclean? — theodorn, Jan 19 '16 at 20:54
OK, let us know how it goes. By the way you should see a list of installed and removed packages in the /var/log/apt/history.log file. — theodorn, Jan 19 '16 at 21:03
Neither really helped at all. I'm looking to remove all the packages like gnome-screensaver, etc that were installed when I installed ubuntu-desktop — Luke Taylor, Jan 19 '16 at 21:10
@theodorn the log file is very helpful, though. I can see that apt-get install xinit installed xserver-xorg-video-vmware, and remove that. I'm writing a python script to organize the full list in a copy/pasteable format. — Luke Taylor, Jan 19 '16 at 21:17
I see. I thought the packages would be removed with autoremove. Maybe you should try reinstalling ubuntu-desktop in Synaptic Package Manager. Then you get a list of all the dependencies BEFORE you install, not afterwards as in the terminal. In removal, the reverse happens, you see all the packages due to be removed before confirming. OK good to know it helped somewhat. — theodorn, Jan 19 '16 at 21:17
Possible duplicate of Remove packages to tranform ubuntu Desktop to Server? — bain, Jan 19 '16 at 23:52
@bain possibly, the answer here more thoroughly accomplished this task. — Luke Taylor, Jan 20 '16 at 01:37

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 19 '16 at 23:27

I used this Python script to parse the log file for all the packages that were installed as dependencies of xinit and ubuntu-desktop:

REMOVETHESE='xinit','ubuntu-desktop'

#Return an input string with everything parenthesized removed. 
def removeParenthesized(inp):
    while "(" in inp:
        opening=inp.find("(")-1
        ending=inp.find(")")+1
        inp=inp[:opening]+inp[ending:]
    return inp
#Load the log file
with open("/var/log/apt/history.log","r") as logfile:
    log=logfile.read()
#Separate each log entry. 
entries=log.split("\n\n")
#Dict pairs the name of an installed package with the full log entry for that installation
entries={e.split("\n")[1].split(" ")[-1] : "\n".join(e.split("\n")[2:-2])[8:] for e in entries if e.split("\n")[1].split(" ")[2]=="install"}
#Entries of packages to remove
toRemove=[entries[rt] for rt in REMOVETHESE]
#To be removed
removals=[]

for entry in toRemove:
    #Remove the parenthesized information
    entry = removeParenthesized(entry)
    #Split entries by comma, removing the initial space
    packages = [e[1:] for e in entry.split(',')]
    #Remove the info after the colon
    packages=[p.split(':')[0] for p in packages]
    #Add dependencies for this package to list
    removals.extend(packages)
#Print all dependencies 
print ' '.join(removals)

Then, I pasted the output on the end of an apt-get autoremove. The output made me very happy: About a minute later, the packages had all been removed! Thanks for your help, @theodorn.

Log of all dependencies installed with a package

1 Answers1