"linux-purge" does not support "grep -q ..." on its ouput in simulation mode.

[Seb Bonnard]

Hi,

I've defined the folling alias to cleanup old kernels :

alias cleanupOldKernels="\linux-purge -k 2 -s | grep -q ', [^0] to remove' && sudo screen -L \linux-purge -k 2"

This alias uses the grep command to check for older kernels than removes them if necessary.

The grep command by itself is supported :
$ linux-purge -k 2 -s | grep ', [^0] to remove'
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
But when I use `grep -q`, `linux-purge` complains :
$ linux-purge -k 2 -s | grep -q ', [^0] to remove'
[linux-purge] ERROR: Aborting due to an unknown error (141).

Can you please fix this and increment the version number upto something like v1.0.1 ?

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

What do you use the version number for? I have been thinking about implementing the versioning, but linux-purge has not been released as a package, yet, and maybe never will. Still, it would be good to know which commit of linux-purge is used, so knowing the git hash id would be good. That is not a version number in sense you could tell of two ids which is newer, though, without referring to git. Maybe counting the commits would do for minor version number, so the next one would be 1.103 or 1.0.103, or I could add separate reporting of the used git commit.

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

As for the error message issue, one option to avoid it is simply to add 2>/dev/null in the end of the linux-purge command in your alias or command line. I could suppress the error message for broken pipe error in linux-purge script, and let the script have exit status 141, but the message might be useful in debugging sometimes. Still, most tools do not give an error message in such a case, so I'll consider changing this.

Anyway, as for checking whether linux-purge would purge something, grepping its output is not be the ideal solution. (And it is tricky: your regular expression would not work, if there were "10 to remove".) I could add a separate option giving e.g. the list of the packages, instead.

[Seb Bonnard (sebma)]

@jarnos Hi, I proposed a version number because I want to be sure I have the latest release of script.
But you could as well use a build number as well.

Thanks for the regexp notice, I'll use `grep ', [1-9][0-9]* to remove'` untill you implement that option to list the packages that would be removed.

Thanks and congratulation for this great tool !

[Seb Bonnard (sebma)]

@jarnos Redirecting errors to /dev/null is bad idea. Some error could inform the user of a serious pb. (filesystem errors for example).

BTW : I changed my regexp to this : `grep -wq '^Purg'`

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

With the latest version it is better to check, if the output of

linux-purge --list --keep=2

is non-empty to check if linux-purge would purge something by "sudo linux-purge --keep=2".

[Seb Bonnard (sebma)]

@jarnos
Your new version (1.0.119-c64222c) works fine on Ubuntu Xenial but it has a strange behavior on Ubuntu Bionic :
$ linux-version list
4.15.0-118-generic
4.4.0-190-generic
$ linux-purge --list --keep=2
linux-image-4.4.0-187-generic
linux-image-4.4.0-189-generic
linux-modules-4.4.0-187-generic
linux-modules-4.4.0-189-generic
linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-187-generic

Maybe it's because of my Xenial to Bionic upgrade.

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

Please attach the file generated by

linux-purge --list --keep=2 --debug

Besides, do one of the following scripts output something?

for i in /var/log/dpkg.log.*.gz; do gzip -cd $i | grep --label=$i -FH 'purge linux-generic'; done

grep -FH 'purge linux-generic' /var/log/dpkg.log /var/log/dpkg.log.?

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

At least you should ensure that you have linux-generic package installed.

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

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