Remove Old Kernels, Snaps, and Flatpak packages in Ubuntu with a One-Liner Command

Remove Old Kernels in Ubuntu with a One-Liner Command

Based on this blog post, which explains the different parts that make up the pipeline.

Edit (Mar 18, 2020): Added grep -v "hwe" to the pipeline to exclude hardware enablement packages.

First, check which kernel version is loaded in memory:

uname -a

To see which packages will be removed:

dpkg -l linux-* | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e `uname -r | cut -f1,2 -d"-"` | grep -e [0-9] | grep -E "(image|headers|modules|tools)" | grep -v "hwe" | xargs sudo apt --dry-run remove

Make sure only old kernel versions are listed. To actually remove them:

dpkg -l linux-* | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e `uname -r | cut -f1,2 -d"-"` | grep -e [0-9] | grep -E "(image|headers|modules|tools)" | grep -v "hwe" | xargs sudo apt -y purge

On my computers, this command is also available locally as ~/bin/removekernel. It will automatically invoke sudo when the "-y" switch is added. Download here: removekernel.sh

Remove Old Snaps with a One-Liner Command

Based on this question on SuperUser. The awk-less version doesn’t work, though.

To list installed snaps, simply use:

snap list --all

Then, to remove snaps that are currently disabled (which most of the time happens to be old versions):

LANG=C snap list --all | awk '/disabled/{print $1, $3}' | while read snapname revision; do sudo snap remove "$snapname" --revision="$revision"; done

The LANG=C ensures this one-liner to run on any locale, as explained in one of the comments in the SuperUser page.

Remove Unused Flatpak Packages with a One-Liner Command

Finally, to round it up, I will quote the command posted on this article for cleaning up old/unused Flatpak packages:

flatpak uninstall --unused

---

last edited: Mar 10, 2022 (WYP)

home