deborphan and debfoster

Today I came across two cool utilities of Debian: deborphan and debfoster.

Deborphan finds 'orphan'ed packages in your system. It detects those packages that aren't being depended on by any other packages. So, if one doesn't want them, they are safe to remove.

#deborphan

This showed me those redundanat packages; I could've removed them one by one but I chose to remove them all at once by this command:

#deborphan | xargs apt-get -y remove --purge

[Note: I find it's always a good idea to keep a backup, just in case for if things get messed up. So I ran "#deborphan > change_list" to keep the name of the packages into change_list file, so that I reinstall them if I needed so.]

Debfoster, the other package does similar thing but in reverse manner, it checks those packages that are holding other packages installed as it depends on them. It then prompts the user whether he wants to keep or deinstall those packages with dependencies one by one.

#debfoster
kdegames is keeping the following 32 packages installed:
kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce
kdegames-card-data kenolaba kfouleggs kgoldrunner kjumpingcube klickety
klines kmahjongg kmines knetwalk kolf konquest kpat kpoker kreversi ksame
kshisen ksirtet ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel ktron ktuberling
kwin4 lskat
Keep kdegames? [Ynpsiuqx?], [H]elp:

I chose N to remove those.

Using these two commands I have recovered a lot of disk space that was otherwise reserved by the programmes I never use.