How to completely remove a package in Debian?

Question

I tried to use this:

aptitude remove denyhosts

And it seemed successfully but after a reboot after I use:

ps aux | grep "denyhosts"

I see denyhosts is still loaded after startup.

So what am I supposed to do so that I can stop and destroy it once and for all? "aptitude remove something" isn't meant for uninstalling?

Solution 1

Will remove a package and all configuration files.

apt-get --purge remove package

If it is still giving you issues, try reinstalling then purging:

apt-get --reinstall install package
apt-get --purge remove package

You still might need to:

killall package

Reboot and if it started again run:

update-rc.d remove package

Story Time: Once for some unknown reason, when I purge removed ejabberd; it continued running. I trusted apt-get to kill it and remove it. It didn't. Needless to say, it eventually filled up my entire /var with a ramdisk log file. It continued until I killed all of the ejabberd processes and that quickly resolved the issue. So it taught me to always be sure that apt-get worked and killed all needed processes.

Solution 2

In case you prefer aptitude:

# aptitude purge denyhosts

purge should also remove the init scripts, so the update-rc.d step is not really necessary.

Another thing that is possible that another package also provides a daemon called denyhosts. To search for all installed packages that contain files with denyhosts in them:

$ dpkg -S denyhosts

Comments

[liori]

Spelling...

[Michael Pobega]

Just so you know, aptitude is the preferred package manager in Debian.

[0x89]

Thanks, but IF you want to help, point out where somebody misspelled something, don't make them scan the entire post. If you just want to bitch about some non-native speaker making a mistake, have fun.

[David Rickman]

apt-get, aptitude, and dpkg are all preferred package managers for Debian. It doesn't really matter much anymore as it has before. If Debian really only wanted a single package manager, they would symlink one of them to the others and teach the new one the same switches.

[cas]

i would guess that the spelling mistake he's referring to is "dpgk" instead of "dpkg" - it's a typing mistake i make frequently when i'm typing too fast. often enough that i've got used to typing "^gk^kg<ENTER>" to fix it.

[0x89]

Thanks Craig. I thought it was deamon <-> daemon - that's a mistake I frequently make. When I misstype dpkg my zsh kindly asks me if it is allowed to correct my mistake, but Serverfault currently misses that feature ;-)

[datasn.io]

Thanks! I found that apt-get couldn't really get rid of the package completely as I installed it with 'aptitude install' in the first place. apatitude purge denyhosts successfully removed the package completely!

[user649102]

@kavoir.com "apt-get couldn't really get rid of the package completely" <---- this is just wrong.