Package Management – Remove Recommended Packages

Aptitude can perform some fairly fancy searches

This will show all the packages that have a Recommends that isn't satisfied:

aptitude search '?installed?broken-recommends'

To restrict it to a specific recommended package:

aptitude search '?installed?broken-recommends(PACKAGE)'

Looks like apt-get's wildcard search is broken! I tried some simulations (-s option).

I tried sudo apt-get -s --purge remove orca* and it said it wanted to remove 84 packages.

I tried sudo apt-get -s --purge remove orc* and the number went up to 1446.

I tried sudo apt-get -s --purge remove orcaa* and the list was 'gnome-orca' and 'ngorca'.

I'd agree with the suggestion to reinstall ubuntu-desktop and then test the wildcard search with option -s to give you a list of what it's going to do before it does it.

Now, where the bug report address for the apt-get maintainers... :)

While logging the bug report, I realised that the match is a regex (regular expression) hence '*' means zero or more of the preceeding character. orcaa* works becuase is 'o','r','c','a' followed by zero or more 'a' characters so the 'a*' serves simply to flag it as a regex search rather than an exact match. Canonically, it should probably be '.*' meaning zero or more of any character.

Your match, 'orca*', matches anything with 'o','r','c' followed by zero or more 'a' characters hence you get a lot more packages. For example, it matched liborc-0.4.0 which would have forced anything depending on that to be removed as well. apt-get may also have removed other items which were installed to satisfy dependencies and are no longer required.

(PS: it's not a bug!)