APTRemovng packages

Removing packages from a Debian system

If you no longer want to use a package, you can remove it from your system using APT. To do this just type: apt-get remove package. For example:

# apt-get remove gnome-panel
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
gnome-applets gnome-panel gnome-panel-data gnome-session
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 14.6MB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

As you can see in the above example, APT also takes care of removing packages which depend on the package you have asked to remove. There is no way to remove a package using APT without also removing those packages that depend on it.

Running apt-get as above will cause the packages to be removed but their configuration files, if any, will remain intact on the system. For a complete removal of the package, run:

# apt-get --purge remove gnome-panel
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
gnome-applets* gnome-panel* gnome-panel-data* gnome-session*
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 14.6MB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Note the '*' after the names. This indicates that the configuration files for each of these packages will also be removed."