On 13/02/14 06:04, Sven Joachim wrote:
> On 2014-02-12 17:25 +0100, rpr nospam wrote:
>
>> In order to uninstall all libreoffice packages I ran the following
>> apt-get command with a simple regular expression:
>>
>> $ sudo apt-get remove 'libreoffice.*'
>> Reading package lists... Done
>> Building dependency tree
>> Reading state information... Done
>> Note, selecting 'libreoffice.org-calc' for regex 'libreoffice.*'
>> Note, selecting 'libreoffice.org-writer' for regex 'libreoffice.*'
>> Package 'libreoffice.org-calc' is not installed, so not removed
>> Package 'libreoffice.org-writer' is not installed, so not removed
>> 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
>>
>> I'd say this output is unexpected because apt-get does not select
>> installed libreoffice packages listed by dpkg-query.
>>
>> But if the regular expression starts with ^ I get the expected result:
>
> The apt-get manpage contains the following paragraph:
>
> If no package matches the given expression and the expression
> contains one of '.', '?' or '*' then it is assumed to be a POSIX
> regular expression, and it is applied to all package names in the
> database. Any matches are then installed (or removed). Note that
> matching is done by substring so 'lo.*' matches 'how-lo' and
> 'lowest'. If this is undesired, anchor the regular expression with
> a '^' or '$' character, or create a more specific regular
> expression.
>
> My interpretation of that paragraph is that apt-get first tries to
> interpret the pattern as a wildcard (see glob(7)) and only tries a
> regular expression match if the glob produces no matches.
That would suggest that using the term 'regex' in the output ("Note,
selecting 'libreoffice.org-calc' for regex 'libreoffice.*'") is a bug.
Richard
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