How can I remove Orphan Packages in Fedora?

Question

I just switched from Ubuntu to Fedora14. In Ubuntu we had the apt-get autoremove thing to remove orphan/unused packages. What is the counterpart in Fedora?

Answer 1

package-cleanup --quiet --leaves from the yum-utils package will list the library packages which aren't relied upon by other packages. Unfortunately it tends to be a bit overeager. On my system, for example, it suggested removing libvirt. Adding the --exclude-bin argument helps. If you're happy with it's suggestion, then to clean up the packages, do:

# package-cleanup --quiet --leaves --exclude-bin | xargs yum remove -y

Answer 2

# package-cleanup --orphans >/tmp/junk

edit the /tmp/junk file and remove the first line which is informational from the command line enter the following:

for file in `cat /tmp/junk`
do
  yum remove $file
done

Answer 3

yum remove $(package-cleanup --leaves)

Answer 4

you need to install the yum plugin "remove-with-leaves":

# yum install yum-plugin-remove-with-leaves.noarch

once installed:

# yum remove --remove-leaves package

good luck!

Answer 5

Building upon Larry Mohr's answer:

package-cleanup --orphans | sed '1d' | sed '/^ * /d' | sed '/Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile/d' | xargs sudo yum remove

(Includes skipping for fastest mirror, if you wonder.)

Answer 6

Currently, yum does not have a command that matches apt-get autoremove.

(Which is kind of surprising.)

Although during installation of packages installed dependencies are marked as such (seems to be relatively new feature of rpm/yum).

You can find unneeded dependencies via:

$ package-cleanup --leaves -q --all \
    | xargs repoquery --installed --qf '%{nvra} - %{yumdb_info.reason}' \
    | grep -- '- dep' \
    | cut -d' ' -f1 > tmp

This command line is inspired by fenris02's script.

After inspection of tmp (and perhaps curation) you could remove them via something like this:

# xargs yum remove < tmp

Change the behavior of future yum removes

Yum now supports the config option (via /etc/yum.conf):

clean_requirements_on_remove=yes

yum.conf(5)

When this is set, the next yum remove also tries to remove auto installed dependencies iff they are not needed by other packages.

Answer 7

# yum autoremove
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit, remove-
              : with-leaves