This is a quick and dirty way of removing and purging unused packages under Debian. When doing package development I found myself doing a lot of dpkg --purge manually. This was tedious. Also to find all unused packages left behind from old package installations can be tricky to do manually. Luckily there is a nice tool called deborphan that locate these unreferenced packages automatically. apt-get install deborphan It is actually a two-step process to remove all unwanted old files. First we have to uninstall all orphaned packages given by deborphan and then do a purge of all remaining files. I have combined these two steps in a simple shell script. #!/bin/bash ORPHANS=`deborphan` if [ ! -z "$ORPHANS" ]; then dpkg --remove $ORPHANS fi PURGES=`dpkg --list | grep ^rc | awk '{ print $2; }'` if [ ! -z "$PURGES" ]; then dpkg --purge $PURGES fi I believe the script speaks for itself. Simple but effective.