October 7, 2014
When running an aptitude purge <package>
, unlike with remove
, the package’s configuration files will also be purged.
However, while in both cases the unneeded dependencies are removed, they’re not recursively purged when using purge
. This results in all <package>
dependencies configuration files remaining on the system (and there can be a lot if you install recommendations and suggestions, which is the default).
While I don’t know a way to make purge
recursively purge the dependencies configuration files, you can run aptitude purge '~c'
to remove the configuration files of all previously removed (but not purged) packages.
See also aptitude search patterns for all the neat stuff you can use in aptitude queries!