Comment 123 for bug 798414

I have a text file in my home directory with the following snippet I found on an Ubuntu forum that i'm copying and pasting every time my boot dir runs out of memory:

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

I have no idea what the above command does - I see some horrifying regexes and a double-nested sed call and some weird parameters and apt-get.... That's what this bug has reduced me to - copy-paste random commands into terminal. It seems to happen with the normal recommended boot partition - how are other users not hitting this all the time? Shouldn't every single user with recommended partitioning eventually run out of space and hit this total failure? Because I'm wondering about Grandma-machines where somebody just gets used to ignoring the fact that they can't update.