On 14 May 2003, Ted Gould wrote:

> Typically what I'll do for mass uninstalls using rpm is the following:
>
> rpm -qa | grep kde | xargs rpm -e
>
> And usually that turns up a few more packages that are dependent, but
> you can just tack them on the end of the command line.  Not an elegant
> solution, but one that works out okay.

Which could take an hour or more ...

On systems with over 1500 packages, I used -v with the rpm -e and saved
the results and then cut and grepped and xargs and did some more rpm -ve
of the dependencies and so on.

Is there any RPM tool like "dpkg --set-selections" (followed by "apt-get
dselect-upgrade")?

(Its nice with the *BSDs when you can just delete the /usr/local or
/usr/pkg directory and all that is left is base system.)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/