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amar
Asked: 2024-06-26 15:55:52 +0800 CST

How to determine if lib is not needed in ubuntu

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binstats log determines a lot of libs as unused. Example of just two libs

unused:
   /usr/lib/liblsp-r3d-glx-lib-1.0.16.so (lsp-plugins-r3d-glx)
   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liba52-0.7.4.so (liba52-0.7.4)

How to determine if the lib is not really needed and can be safely removed.

.desktop

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    To check if a package might cause problems if removed, use the apt-cache rdepends command (to check for reverse dependencies).

    An example with libzstd1: (tail -n +3 removes the headers, and sort -u shows only unique lines)

    $ apt-cache rdepends --installed libzstd1 | tail -n +3 | sort -u
  btrfs-progs
  dpkg
  kmod
  libapt-pkg6.0
  libarchive13
  libboost-iostreams1.74.0
  libcurl3-gnutls
  libcurl4
  libkmod2
  libmysqlclient21
  libsystemd0
  libtiff5
  rsync
  squashfs-tools
  systemd

    This means that both dpkg and systemd depends on this package, so probably not a good idea to remove.

    You could do the same for your packages:

    $ apt-cache rdepends --installed lsp-plugins-r3d-glx | tail -n +3 | sort -u 
$ apt-cache rdepends --installed liba52-0.7.4 | tail -n +3 | sort -u

    And you'll get a list of packages that depend on the given package. That will tell you if it's a good idea to remove it or not.

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