How to exclude a package from apt-get autoremove?
I’m in a situation where the list of orphaned packages to be removed by apt-get autoremove includes a package that I want to keep. Apparently I have accidentally removed a package which was depending on it. How can I now mark the package as explicitly desired, so that apt-get autoremove will not remove it?
A few more Google attempts brought up a solution:
It is either possible to just install explicitly:
sudo apt-get install <package>
or marking as manually installed via
sudo apt-mark manual <package>
apt won’t re-install, the output will just look like:
$ sudo apt-get install tmux
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
tmux is already the newest version.
tmux set to manually installed.
Use apt-mark
$ man apt-mark
...
manual
manual is used to mark a package as being manually installed, which will
prevent the package from being automatically removed if no other packages
depend on it.
So
sudo apt-mark manual <package-name>
Now autoremove won’t remove it.
To undo
sudo apt-mark auto <package-name>
Now autoremove will remove the package if it is not a dependency of any other package.
This is already answered well, but I found a situation where I did not want to “mark” many of the packages (and then un-mark them after autoremove).
When the list of packages you want to autoremove is easily-defined, then you can pipe/sed/xargs them out.
I don’t have a complex example of many packages, but if I have the following scenario:
root@fptc-rsvrd:~# apt-get autoremove
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libluajit-5.1-2 libluajit-5.1-common linux-headers-4.4.0-141 linux-headers-4.4.0-141-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-143 linux-headers-4.4.0-143-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-146 linux-headers-4.4.0-146-generic
linux-image-4.4.0-141-generic linux-image-4.4.0-143-generic linux-image-4.4.0-146-generic linux-image-extra-4.4.0-141-generic linux-modules-4.4.0-143-generic linux-modules-4.4.0-146-generic
linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-143-generic linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-146-generic linux-signed-image-4.4.0-141-generic pandoc-data
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 18 to remove and 19 not upgraded.
After this operation, 907 MB disk space will be freed.
and I want to remove just the linux* packages, I can do this:
root@fptc-rsvrd:~# apt-get autoremove -s | sed -ne 's/Remv (linux[^[]*)[.*/1/gp'
linux-headers-4.4.0-141-generic
linux-headers-4.4.0-141
linux-headers-4.4.0-143-generic
linux-headers-4.4.0-143
linux-headers-4.4.0-146-generic
linux-headers-4.4.0-146
linux-signed-image-4.4.0-141-generic
linux-image-extra-4.4.0-141-generic
linux-image-4.4.0-141-generic
linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-143-generic
linux-image-4.4.0-143-generic
linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-146-generic
linux-image-4.4.0-146-generic
linux-modules-4.4.0-143-generic
linux-modules-4.4.0-146-generic
So from here, it’s easy to pass these via xargs as command-line arguments to the simple apt-get remove -y:
apt-get autoremove -s
| sed -ne 's/Remv (linux[^[]*)[.*/1/gp'
| xargs apt-get remove -y
Normally when using xargs, I’d guard against spaces in the arguments (e.g., find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ...), but since package names don’t have spaces in them, I’m comfortable using newline-delimited arguments.
(I’d think it other situations, it’d be more appropriate to “mark” a hold, the unhold the packages. That can also be done with regexes and xargs, but is probably over-engineering the situation.)