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Will it be logical by means of Debian oriented logic to unite the three commands apt-get clean and apt-get autoclean, and apt-get autoremove into one single command that does all of them?

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  • 3
    What "Debian oriented logic" are you referring to? Dec 9, 2017 at 21:32
  • Common logic in Debian systems like Debian and Ubuntu. The logic comes out in syntax, commands, terminology, etc. Dec 9, 2017 at 22:13

1 Answer 1

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This completely depends on what you want to achieve, they are separate for a reason. But lets see what they actually do:

  • apt/apt-get clean → cleans the packages and install script in /var/cache/apt/archives/
  • apt/apt-get autoclean → cleans obsolete deb-packages, less than clean
  • apt/apt-get autoremove → removes orphaned packages which are not longer needed from the system, but not purges them, use the --purge option together with the command for that.

So it is up to you to decide if you want to combine one of the first two with the last one and you can do this like below:

sudo apt autoremove && sudo apt clean

If thats what you really want to do, but now to code an extra command for it is pretty superfluous to be honest.

Further reading material:

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    I defined an alias for sudo bash -c "apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade && apt-get -y autoremove && apt-get -y clean" and it serves me well. Caution: autoremove removes old kernel images.
    – dessert
    Dec 9, 2017 at 22:15
  • If I understood your answer correctly, you mean to say that sudo apt-get autoremove && sudo apt-get clean covers everything in sudo apt-get autoclean? Dec 10, 2017 at 1:08
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    Exactly, autoclean only removes files out out the archives which can no longer be downloaded, clean nukes the archives completely.
    – Videonauth
    Dec 10, 2017 at 1:11
  • rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* Mar 13 at 18:49

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