Removing packages using a pattern or regular expression

[sryze]

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/.

[MVoz]

vcpkg remove boost[*] ?

[vicroms]

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 😅

[SunnyWar]

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.

[vicroms]

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

[SunnyWar]

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

[jafrado]

Any progress on this issue?

[PhoebeHui]

Currently, you can simply remove all boost components via './vcpkg remove boost-uninstall --recurse', see more discussions in PR #12851.

[pravic]

How about other packages?

[PhoebeHui]

Currently it only works for boost, I reopen this issue for tracking the features request.

[cjwijtmans]

I need to remove specific tripplets ./vcpkg remove *:x86-windows.

[ikolev21]

An alternative in Command Prompt:

FOR /F "usebackq" %i IN (`vcpkg list <the packages you'd like to remove>`) DO vcpkg remove %i

This allows removing for example all "x86-windows" packages like this:

FOR /F "usebackq" %i IN (`vcpkg list x86-windows`) DO vcpkg remove %i

But it needs to run more than once, because I suppose initially removing packages that have dependents will fail.

Or, if you leave vcpkg list without any parameter, after a few runs you'll remove ALL installed packages.

Unfortunately, with "vcpkg list"'s filtering you can't remove just the "x86-windows" packages but not the "x86-windows-static" ones.
So it's not perfect. A regexp for the package reference would do the job.