[Aptitude-devel] how to find orphan/obsolete packages if there are any in my Debian installation ?

[Axel Beckert]

Hi shirish,

shirish शिरीष wrote:
> For a long time I was using the following :-
> 
> [$] alias apto
> apto='aptitude search ~o'
> 
> I used to run apto and it would tell me if there are any obsolete or
> orphan packages left in my Debian installation/apt archive.
> 
> Recently, however from sometime back I have been running into the following :-
> 
> [$] 'aptitude search ~o'
> zsh: command not found: aptitude search ~o
> 
> So, it either seems that the command no longer works or zsh has some
> trouble processing the command. If it's the latter then will look/talk
> to zsh developers to have more, if it's the former however, please
> tell/share how can I look for a listing of obsolete/orphan packages.

It's clearly on the zsh side. So please remove the aptitude-devel list
from the Cc after this mail. (zsh-users at zsh.org may be the proper
mailing list for this issue, but I hope that we can solve your issue
within one or two mails already.)

Being also one of Debian's zsh maintainers, I tried the following:

alias apto='aptitude search ~o'

With this, the "apto" alias fails for me as follows (and actually as
expected from my point of view):

~ → alias apto='aptitude search ~o'
~ → apto
zsh: no such user or named directory: o
~ → 

But this works fine for me:

~ → alias apto='aptitude search \~o'
~ → apto
i A apt-dpkg-ref   - APT, Dpkg Quick Reference sheet
i A asr-manpages   - alt.sysadmin.recovery manual pages
[…]

I'm using zsh 5.0.7-5 as in Debian Jessie currently.

Which zsh version did you use? Do you remember for which zsh version
it worked for you the last time?

This behaviour may also be influenced by the following zshoptions(1):

* cshnullglob
* nullglob
* nomatch

		Regards, Axel
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 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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