aptitude remove pkg_name* not working like apt-get

Question

I have uninstalled (aptitude purge) the qt-sdk package but there is still a lot of qt4* and libqt* packages on my system.

Is there a way to remove all these packages with aptitude remove/purge beginning_of_pkg_name* like we can do with apt-get? Maybe with bash ${} syntax?

I don't understand why we can't do that with aptitude, it really sucks if you have to remove all this packages manually, one by one.

PS: shouldn't aptitude purge package_name remove all dependencies it has downloaded?

Answer 1

Replace * with ~n. For example # aptitude purge qt4~n libqt4~n.

Answer 2

Safe remove of packages with no more dependent

apt-get autoremove

That will give a list of packages pull in by dependency but no longer needed (All dependent packages removed).

Reason packages not showing up in the list

1. They are still used(dependent) by other packages
2. They are installed manually, not pull in by dependency.

Check Reverse Dependency

To check if a package is needed by others, use apt-rdepends -r <pacakge>

# apt-rdepends -r libmagic1| head
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
libmagic1
  Reverse Depends: aegis (4.24.3-3)
  Reverse Depends: aegis-web (4.24.3-3)
  Reverse Depends: dares (0.6.5-6)
  Reverse Depends: dares-qt (0.6.5-6)
  Reverse Depends: dff (1.2.0+dfsg.1-1)
  Reverse Depends: ebook-speaker (2.0-2)
  Reverse Depends: file (= 5.09-2)
  Reverse Depends: file-roller (3.4.1-0ubuntu1)
  Reverse Depends: fossology-agents (1.2.0-3.1ubuntu2)

That will show list of packages depending on libmagic1. The reason head is used is because apt-rdepends -r will recursively calculate the reverse dependency. To see if libmagic1 is depended by anything, we only need the top few lines.

Check apt-get auto-install state

To check if a package is installed manually through apt-get or aptitude

apt-mark showauto | grep libqt4-sql-mysql

or

apt-mark showmanual | grep libqt4-sql-mysql

PS: Without the grep apt-mark will show the whole list of auto or manual installed packges.