DebUninstall Files

This program removes debs, probably works in Debian or any Debian-based OS like Ubuntu or Raspbian. What makes it safe is that it only calls your dpkg and apt-get, it doesn't try to deal with any internals of the apt mechanism. Yes, you can just uninstall the deb, but in many cases that's the tip of the iceberg. Install Gnome and you'll also get 50+ other things that it depends on, those don't go away when you get rid of Gnome again. Autoremove does some of what this does but in many cases I've installed a deb to get the libraries or header files to use with something not in the debs system. I never use autorermove.

When you use dpkg -r to remove something that something else depends on, it gives an error on the screen, but it also returns an error code (non-zero). What this program does is to work through a group of debs from your /var/log/apt/history.log. The removes that don't give an error were (probably) successful so it marks those done and goes through the rest of the list again. In at least a simple situation the first pass will remove the programs that depend on others because nothing depends on them. In the next pass more will suceed, usually all of them.

This is mostly intended for removing stuff you recently installed. Eventually the history.log file will get renamed and compressed by logrotate. But if you can find it (put a copy in /tmp and umncompress it) you can pass the full path to uninstall on the command line and it will work just the same. It won't remove things that other programs installed since rely on. It runs until the number of removals doesn't increase anymore then stops.

If you're really trying to save space like on a small SD card, you should know that there's /var/cache/apt/archives which holds a copy of every deb you install, including ones you remove. You can delete what's in there, it's only used if you remove something then reinstall it.

This could be maybe improved by having a GUI to scroll the list of debs in, but not having one means it's useful in more situations.

When you unistall something it will still be in your history.log. And removals aren't logged at all.

Alan Corey, ab1jx, November 2019