Comment 2 for bug 1883765

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.