I had slimmed down my system to a my needs and then I had a crazy idea, I thought that I would try and compile OpenOffice from source.

So if I managed this I could write a howto. I thought to myself that it would have to be on a full install, so I re-installed all the stuff that I had taken out.

All was going remarkably well until OpenOffice decided that it couldn't find Apache Ant, even when it was told explicitly where it was. I got grumpy at this stage and removed all the packages that I had created.

Now I want my nice slim system back. I have a list of the packages that I want to delete created with and I suspect that I will have to use "cut" and pipe the output to "removepkg", however I am not a programmer and if I see something that looks like "for i in ..." I usually find something better to do.

Could someone give me some pointers as to how to proceed.

Thanks

samac

This works for me - have a look at delete.list with vim and make sure the package names are aligned on byte 50. They are on my system. Then this will remove them when ran as the superuser.

Perfect thanks very much. If I were to try and read that line in plain english would it read:

Cut from the 50th byte onwards in the file delete list, redirect that output per line and read it, then do a remove package on each line that is read.

I knew it could be done, but it is knowing where to start, I was sure that you would need integers and loops etc. Just shows you what I know about programming.

Thanks again

samac

Yeah - your English description of what happens pretty much sums it up. The main workings are in the while read line bit which reads a line from stdin (the output of cut is piped to this). The line variable then holds the remainder of the line cut from byte fifty till the end. The $ sign on the line variable expands it replacing it's contents to the removepkg script.

Thinking about this some more - this should work and is shorter :