How to exclude a package from apt-get autoremove?

Question

I'm in a situation where the list of orphaned packages to be removed by apt-get autoremove includes a package that I want to keep. Apparently I have accidentally removed a package which was depending on it. How can I now mark the package as explicitly desired, so that apt-get autoremove will not remove it?

Answer 1

Use apt-mark

$ man apt-mark
...
manual
       manual is used to mark a package as being manually installed, which will 
prevent the package from being automatically removed if no other packages 
depend on it.

So

sudo apt-mark manual <package-name>

Now autoremove won't remove it.

To undo

sudo apt-mark auto <package-name>

Now autoremove will remove the package if it is not a dependency of any other package.

Answer 2

A few more Google attempts brought up a solution:

It is either possible to just install explicitly:

sudo apt-get install <package>

or marking as manually installed via

sudo apt-mark manual <package>

apt won't re-install, the output will just look like:

$ sudo apt-get install tmux
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
tmux is already the newest version.
tmux set to manually installed.

Answer 3

This is already answered well, but I found a situation where I did not want to "mark" many of the packages (and then un-mark them after autoremove).

When the list of packages you want to autoremove is easily-defined, then you can pipe/sed/xargs them out.

I don't have a complex example of many packages, but if I have the following scenario:

root@fptc-rsvrd:~# apt-get autoremove
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libluajit-5.1-2 libluajit-5.1-common linux-headers-4.4.0-141 linux-headers-4.4.0-141-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-143 linux-headers-4.4.0-143-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-146 linux-headers-4.4.0-146-generic
  linux-image-4.4.0-141-generic linux-image-4.4.0-143-generic linux-image-4.4.0-146-generic linux-image-extra-4.4.0-141-generic linux-modules-4.4.0-143-generic linux-modules-4.4.0-146-generic
  linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-143-generic linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-146-generic linux-signed-image-4.4.0-141-generic pandoc-data
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 18 to remove and 19 not upgraded.
After this operation, 907 MB disk space will be freed.

and I want to remove just the linux* packages, I can do this:

root@fptc-rsvrd:~# apt-get autoremove -s | sed -ne 's/Remv \(linux[^[]*\)\[.*/\1/gp'
linux-headers-4.4.0-141-generic
linux-headers-4.4.0-141
linux-headers-4.4.0-143-generic
linux-headers-4.4.0-143
linux-headers-4.4.0-146-generic
linux-headers-4.4.0-146
linux-signed-image-4.4.0-141-generic
linux-image-extra-4.4.0-141-generic
linux-image-4.4.0-141-generic
linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-143-generic
linux-image-4.4.0-143-generic
linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-146-generic
linux-image-4.4.0-146-generic
linux-modules-4.4.0-143-generic
linux-modules-4.4.0-146-generic

So from here, it's easy to pass these via xargs as command-line arguments to the simple apt-get remove -y:

apt-get autoremove -s \
  | sed -ne 's/Remv \(linux[^[]*\)\[.*/\1/gp' \
  | xargs apt-get remove -y

Normally when using xargs, I'd guard against spaces in the arguments (e.g., find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ...), but since package names don't have spaces in them, I'm comfortable using newline-delimited arguments.

(I'd think it other situations, it'd be more appropriate to "mark" a hold, the unhold the packages. That can also be done with regexes and xargs, but is probably over-engineering the situation.)