Purge old config files of “rc” marked packages in Debian / Ubuntu

If you list your packages for example with “dpkg -l” and notice following:

rc linux-image-3.14-7.dmz.2-liquorix-686 3.14-11
rc linux-image-3.14-8.dmz.1-liquorix-686 3.14-12
rc linux-image-3.14-9.dmz.1-liquorix-686 3.14-13
rc linux-image-3.15-2.dmz.1-liquorix-686 3.15-1

That means you have uninstalled packages but you have some leftover configuration data on your file system.

You can run the following command to purge old configuration files as root:

dpkg -l | grep ^rc | cut -d' ' -f3|xargs dpkg -P

Don’t get scared when it starts to delete files, there should not be any consequences to your running system and config files.

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