I’ve never really played with some of the more advanced features of debian and ubuntu’s package manager, but today I came across something useful.
Ubuntu installs LibreOffice as part of a new installation, which I don’t really want as I use Google Drive for most presentations and spreadsheets. To uninstall it I typed
sudo apt-get remove libre
and pressed the tab button. There were lots of packages, but I couldn’t see a base package that looked like it would remove everything. Just on the off chance that it might work I tried
sudo apt-get remove libre*
This came up with a big list of all the packages that I don’t have installed and told me so
…
Package ‘libreoffice-help-el’ is not installed, so not removed
Package ‘libreoffice-help-en-gb’ is not installed, so not removed
Package ‘libreoffice-help-es’ is not installed, so not removed
Package ‘libreoffice-help-et’ is not installed, so not removed
Package ‘libreoffice-help-eu’ is not installed, so not removed
Package ‘libreoffice-help-fi’ is not installed, so not removed
…
But it also correctly identified the packages to be removed and asked if I wanted to remove them.
I’m not sure whether this functionality is part of how the linux command line globs things or something built into apt-get. Either way, it might come in handy again some time.
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