How to compelety remove php?

Question

I need to clean up my server from PHP 5.3 packages (there are plenty of them) in order to be able to compile PHP 5.2. I am wondering what is the easiest/safest method to get rid of them all?

Thanks

Answer 1

This should completely remove any package wich name starts with php and anything related to it.

sudo apt-get -y purge php*

Answer 2

You'll probably want to purge all the php* packages from your system. Something with a wild-card should work

sudo apt-get purge php*

You may be interested in How to rollback to PHP 5.2 for where to go next.

Answer 3

I do not recommend running sudo apt-get purge php*.

That was scary! Fortunately, I didn't type the -y option, because it chose about hundred of packages without php in their name.

Instead, at How to rollback to PHP 5.2? was a great solution:

sudo aptitude purge `dpkg -l | grep php| awk '{print $2}' |tr "\n" " "`

Answer 4

sudo apt-get -y purge libapache2-mod-php5 libapache2-mod-php5filter libexpect-php5 libgv-php5 libow-php5 php5 php5-adodb php5-auth-pam php5-cgi php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-dbg php5-enchant php5-exactimage php5-ffmpeg php5-fpm php5-geoip php5-gmp php5-idn php5-imagick php5-imap php5-interbase php5-intl php5-json php5-lasso php5-ldap php5-librdf php5-mapscript php5-memcache php5-memcached php5-mhash php5-midgard2 php5-ming php5-mssql php5-mysql php5-mysqlnd php5-odbc php5-pgsql php5-ps php5-pspell php5-radius php5-recode php5-remctl php5-rrd php5-sasl php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-suhosin php5-svn php5-sybase php5-tidy php5-tokyo-tyrant php5-uuid php5-xcache php5-xdebug php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl

In your case, you could search for all the packages:

sudo aptitude search php5|awk {'print $2'}|grep -v i386|grep -v "^A"|tr "\n"  " "

and then purge them:

sudo apt-get purge <list of packages found>