Raspberry Pi A, User Manual, Page: 77 / 314

C H A P T E R 3
L I N U X S Y S T E M A D M I N I S T R A T I O N
61
Uninstalling Software
If you decide you no longer want a piece of software,
apt-get
also includes a
remove
com-
mand that cleanly uninstalls the package along with any dependencies that are no longer
required. When you’re using a smaller SD card with the Pi, the ability to try out software and
quickly remove it is extremely useful.
To remove
nethack-console
, simply open the terminal and type the following command:
sudo apt-get remove nethack-console
The
remove
command has a more powerful brother in the form of the
purge
command.
Like
remove
, the
purge
command gets rid of software you no longer require. Where
remove
leaves the software’s configuration files intact, however,
purge
removes every-
thing. If you’ve got yourself into a mess customising a particular package and it no longer
works,
purge
is the command to use. For example, to purge
nethack-console
, you would
just type this:
sudo apt-get purge nethack-console
Upgrading Software
In addition to installing and uninstalling packages,
apt
can be used to keep them up to date.
Upgrading a package through
apt
ensures that you’ve received the latest updates, bug fixes
and security patches.
Before trying to upgrade a package, make sure the
apt
cache is as fresh as possible by run-
ning an update:
sudo apt-get update
When upgrading software, you have two choices: you can upgrade everything on the system
at once or upgrade individual programs. If you just want to keep your distribution updated,
the former is achieved by typing the following:
sudo apt-get upgrade
To upgrade an individual package, simply tell
apt
to install it again. For example, to install a
nethack-console
upgrade, you would type this:
sudo apt-get install nethack-console