sudo -s

This is taken from shell-fu.org still a pretty handy one liner though

aptitude search ~c | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs aptitude -y purge

This will delete any packages that are not installed anymore which still has configuration files on the box

Debian, Linux, sys admin

deborphan is a package in debian that list orphaned libraries in debian. Handy for removing libraries that is no longer needed on a server. The problem with deborphan is that it only lists packages that are orphaned but doesnt remove them, so I do this:

for i in `deborphan`; do sudo aptitude remove $i; done

I love BASH

Debian, Linux, sys admin