Maclean - A script to automate some (safe) cleaning

[emk2203]

@cscs

For now it rightly reports the whole of the orphans as they will all be removed if the action is affirmed - the idea being that systems should generally not have orphans .. packages that are otherwise orphans but desirable should be marked --asexplicit.

Or in other words: Don’t kick the can down the road. Definitely the right course of action.

But why did I ask my initial question? I thought about it and the reason is that the pure list given by pacman -Qdtq is not giving any information about these packages, just the names.

For my purposes, I use expac -Q "\e[1m%n\e[0m\n%d" $(pacman -Qdtq) to see not only the package names, but also their description.

This helps to see if the orphaned package is, for example, a font which I used somewhere, or the CLI part of a GUI application where I used the CLI, but never the GUI and uninstalled the GUI part. I had both things in the past on my systems and removing the orphans gave me issues later on.

Still undecided on what to do here, if anything.

Maybe this is a separate script waiting to be written, which would include

Maybe creating such a loop/array with the option to mark items as explicitly installed before running full orphan removal?

But you could always include it in the existing script.