Vcpkg: Removing packages using a pattern or regular expression

Created on 7 Oct 2019 · 6Comments · Source: microsoft/vcpkg

It would be nice if it was possible to remove a bunch of packages using a regexp without typing all their names, similar to how apt-get does it. For example, if I install Boost and I want to remove all the Boost libraries there is no way to simply do vcpkg remove boost*, I have to remove every package one by one.

Proposed solution

Make remove accept a regular expression as a package name.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Alternative - delete the files by hand from vcpkg/installed/.

vcpkg-feature

Source

sryze

👍5

Most helpful comment

Hi @sryze,

I'll bring your feature suggestion to the team for discussion, however, I cannot promise that it will be implemented any time soon. But, we would gladly take a PR that implements such a feature!

For boost specifically, I suggest doing vcpkg remove boost-vcpkg-helpers --recurse 😅

vicroms on 10 Oct 2019

👍3

All 6 comments

vcpkg remove boost[*] ?

Voskrese on 8 Oct 2019

👍1

Hi @sryze,

I'll bring your feature suggestion to the team for discussion, however, I cannot promise that it will be implemented any time soon. But, we would gladly take a PR that implements such a feature!

For boost specifically, I suggest doing vcpkg remove boost-vcpkg-helpers --recurse 😅

vicroms on 10 Oct 2019

👍3

I encountered this problem this morning...very, very annoying.

"vcpkg.exe install boost"
"vcpkg.exe remove boost"

dozens of packages left installed. It seems like a bug.

SunnyWar on 31 Jan 2020

Some packages like boost, and qt5 are "meta-packages". This means that these packages themselves are empty, and what they do is depend on other packages to install them all together as a convenience.

As all boost libraries depend on boost-vcpkg-helpers, you should be able to remove them with vcpkg remove boost-vcpkg-helpers --recurse

vicroms on 31 Jan 2020

Thanks @vicroms, that helped. Though there is still stuff left behind:
boost-build:x86-windows 1.72.0 Boost.Build
boost-modular-build-helper:x86-windows 1.72.0
bzip2:x86-windows 1.0.6-4 High-quality data compressor.
libffi:x86-windows 3.1-7 Portable, high level programming interface to va...
liblzma:x86-windows 5.2.4-3 Compression library with an API similar to that ...
openssl-windows:x86-windows 1.1.1d-1 OpenSSL is an open source project that provides ...
openssl:x86-windows 1.1.1d OpenSSL is an open source project that provides ...
python3:x86-windows 3.7.3 The Python programming language as an embeddable...
zlib:x86-windows 1.2.11-5 A compression library
zstd:x86-windows 1.4.0-1 Zstandard - Fast real-time compression algorithm