I know that I can use apt-get remove <package> to remove a program.
But apt is a program itself. Could I use apt-get remove apt to remove it, or would it get confused part way through?
SnapOverflow
APT lets you simulate your commands using the option
-s. You can try this yourself, issuing the commandapt-get -s remove apt(nosudoneeded).This yields the following output:
So the answer should be: yes, you can.
You can...
and will be warned you are about to do something very destructive. I must say ... the list of packages looks horrific for a space saving of less then 6000kb :D
It does finish but there is no way back using "apt-get". Ubuntu Software Center will no longer work and you would need to use "dpkg" to re-install a package manager (and manually also need to install all the dependencies).
Once, back when I ran CoreUbuntu, I installed a buggy package from source which
aptdecided obsoletedapt. Next time I ranapt autoremove, I didn't actually look at the list of software to be removed andaptwas in the list.Imagine my surprise next time I typed
apt install <package-name>and gotThe program 'apt' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install apt.Luckily, for some reason,
autoremovedidn't remove any ofapt's dependencies so all I had to do waswgetapt's.debarchive and reinstall usingdpkg -i.As shown in the other answers, if you remove
aptwithapt, you'll be in more trouble because of the dependencies it tries to resolve.I find it interesting but it is indeed the case that (certainly for Debian, and perhaps Fedora/openSUSE to an extent?) many modern distros are defined and built largely upon the infrastructure provided by their package manager of choice.
Technically, apt can't remove apt... because apt doesn't know how to remove, install or upgrade packages. The tasks of installing, removing, upgrading, configuring packages are left to dpkg. Although you can tell apt to remove the package called "apt", what it does is checks the reverse dependencies of the apt package, take note of those packages and orders dpkg to remove them. Which is what can be seen in the other answers.
Even without apt you can use dpkg to install, remove or upgrade packages, just that it will be more painful to track dependencies and upgrades needed, which is the raison d'être of apt.
Of course you can. Apt and dpkg are themselves packages, and they are meant to be able to be updated via themselves, so there are provisions for removal; otherwise
/var/lib/dpkg/info/dpkg.prermand/var/lib/dpkg/info/dpkg.postrmwould not have reason to exist :)If you accidentally removed them in a way that left you without dpkg, you could still manually unpack the .deb archive for dpkg unless you also got rid of binutils, tar, gzip/bzip2.
--purgeon any packages involved with the apt toolchain could give you nasty problems, though; hard to tell what owns certain files in/var/lib/dpkg. If/var/lib/dpkg/statusgot deleted and there was no current backup, then yes, the package manager would be beyond repair on that system.I swear I saw the
aptbinaries under/usr/local/binon an Ubuntu-based system not long ago, but they're not there on my current Ubuntu MATE 15.04 system (they're in/usr/binwith most of the other binaries). If it was in/usr/local/binthen it probably wouldn't be possible to uninstall it withaptbecause the files in/usr/local/binare supposed to be ignored by the package manager. I must admit that puttingapt(anddpkgas well) under/usr/local/binwould be a good idea.A more interesting question is - what happens if you uninstall
dpkg? Sure enough,dpkgis listed as a package byapt, but I'm not going to try uninstalling it now (haven't got a virtual machine set up at the moment). Theoretically one could also uninstall it withdpkgitself. I'm going to take an educated guess that the only way to re-install it would be to do so manually, then hope that it picks up the existing configuration files (so you don't have to manually tell the system all over again what packages are installed) and then tell it that the packagedpkgis now installed again.(A joke:) A Debian user's equivalent of
# rm -rf /is# apt-get purge ".*".