How can I get a list with the packages selected by apt-get autoremove?

Question

Is there any command that prints only the name of the packages that apt-get autoremove selects? I'm creating a script that updates the kernel, removes the old kernel and the unnecessary packages (apt-get autoremove), but I want to print on the screen the list of packages that will be removed by apt-get autoremove, how can I do this?

Solution 1

Since as per your comment you want to list only the packages that are going to be removed:

apt-get --dry-run autoremove | grep -Po '^Remv \K[^ ]+'

grep command breakdown:

• -P: Interprets the given pattern as a PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) pattern
• -o: Prints only the matched string instead of the whole line

Regex breakdown:

• ^: matches the start of the line
• Remv: matches a Remv string
• \K: excludes the previously matched substring from the matched string
• [^ ]+: matches one or more characters not

$ apt-get --dry-run autoremove | grep -Po 'Remv \K[^ ]+'
libapache2-mod-php5
php5-readline
php5-cli
libonig2
libqdbm14
php5-json
php5-common 

Solution 2

Actually you only need to filter the output of your

sudo apt-get autoremove --dry-run 

command.

For instance you can do it with

sudo apt-get autoremove --dry-run  | head -n 5 | tail -n 1

Comments

[Admin]

You should just be able to get it to run sudo apt-get autoremove -y and it should autoremove anything needed to be removed...

[Doug]

Try reading here, [This may be of help.][1] [1]: serverfault.com/questions/433250/…

[heemayl]

To get the list of packages without removing them actually you can do sudo apt-get --dry-run autoremove

[Afonso Sousa]

I just want to get the name of the packages, not the entire output of the command....

[Afonso Sousa]

Your command works too!! But I prefer the kos's command... But thanks in same!! :)

[jarno]

@GeekLynxAfonso, you don't need to use sudowith --dry-run option.

[kos]

@jarno Makes sense, the fact that it was probably not needed didn't occur to me. Thanks