How to use "purge" on openSUSE?

corgi · 11-Oct-2015, 07:47

I want to remove the program and all related files, is "purge" the command I'm looking for? Does zypper rm program remove all files the program has created?
For example, I want to completely remove Audacity because the program doesn't start and I need to reinstall. How to do that?

**malcolmlewis** · 11-Oct-2015, 08:08

Originally Posted by corgi

I want to remove the program and all related files, is "purge" the command I'm looking for? Does zypper rm program remove all files the program has created?
For example, I want to completely remove Audacity because the program doesn't start and I need to reinstall. How to do that?

Hi
Use the force command with zypper to re-install, you would need to manually remove any configuration files in you home directory.

Code:

zypper in -f <some_package>

Normally starting from the command line with a debug command line option should show what's not working?

corgi · 11-Oct-2015, 08:18

Originally Posted by malcolmlewis

Hi
Use the force command with zypper to re-install, you would need to manually remove any configuration files in you home directory.

Code:

zypper in -f <some_package>

Normally starting from the command line with a debug command line option should show what's not working?

Ok, but I really want to now how to use purge. I installed Tomahawk and completely disliked it, how can I "purge" the program and all config files?

Audacity debug gives me this error:

Code:

An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for Audacity. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.

**malcolmlewis** · 11-Oct-2015, 08:25

Hi
I normally just do an search and installed;

Code:

zypper se -i tomahawk

Then a zypper rm on the list of installed application/libraries should remove all the system related files and libraries.

In your home directory, config files are either in .local .config .<someapp> or maybe .kde* and easy way is just to search;

Code:

cd
find . -name tom*

Should give you an idea where things are to manually remove.

**hcvv** · 11-Oct-2015, 08:30

Originally Posted by corgi

Ok, but I really want to now how to use purge. I installed Tomahawk and completely disliked it, how can I "purge" the program and all config files?

Audacity debug gives me this error:

Code:

An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for Audacity. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.

Removing a package wth zypper or YaST will remove the files that were installed on installation. Not those files you might have added later. In general that would include the config files (e.g. in /etc), but some programs might offer you to use optional configuration files. I guess those will not be removed, being unknown to the original RPM that is removed.

Also any user configuration files or other files created/used by the program(s) involved (mostly somewhere inside the user's home directory) will of course not be removed.

About your Audicity problem, that is of course a different problem, which you might ask in the Multimedia (sub)forum here. As it is now, almost nobody (and specialy not the Multimedia gurus) will see it.

**tsu2** · 12-Oct-2015, 08:52

Doing a "force re-install" should ordinarily automatically over-write any modified config files with default versions, so locating and removing configs should be unnecessary. Typically, this also means that you don't have to manually remove the mis-behaving package which might leave the problem config file in place(it depends).

Simply use the "-f" flag to force re-install, eg (I don't know what your audicity package name is actually called)

Code:

zypper in -f audicity

TSU

**I_A** · 12-Oct-2015, 09:10

Originally Posted by corgi

I want to remove the program and all related files, is "purge" the command I'm looking for? Does zypper rm program remove all files the program has created?

No such thing, a program removing user's files is not a good idea.

For example, I want to completely remove Audacity because the program doesn't start and I need to reinstall. How to do that?

This isn't windows if a program fails to start run it in a terminal and see the error messages, no need to reinstall as Linux has no registry (the only reason a reinstall fixes things in windows are bad registry keys/values).