aptitude fun!

We all know how to use aptitude user tags, don't we?

sudo aptitude install --add-user-tag tag_name package_name

sudo aptitude purge '?user-tag(tag_name)'

Well, that was simple. Let's do some more complicated stuff. Let's try to list all packages in our system that has user tag set:

aptitude show "?user-tag(d*)"

Got it? I didn't. You should add a letter (any letter) before your wildcard to get results. How and why it is working that way - no idea. The only thing I know is I run into it by accident. Of course it's a good idea to combine with grep:

aptitude show "?user-tag(d*)" | grep "User Tags"

Now it's more simple. We have a list of our user tags
(OK, OK, I know:

aptitude show "?user-tag(d*)" | grep "User Tags" | awk '{print $3}' | sort -u

)
But what now? Let's assume we want to remove some user tag from a package:

sudo aptitude remove-user-tag tag_name package_name

What if we want to remove user tag from all packages where it's set. Easy: just two commands:
1.

aptitude show "?user-tag(tag_name)" | grep ^Package | awk '{print $2}'

2. make a list of packages and run

sudo aptitude remove-user-tag tag_name [long list of packages here]

Is it really long list? If it really is you should experience a lot of hassle doing copy/paste into the aptitude command. But hopefully there is hope!

USER_TAG=tag_name; for i in $(aptitude show "?user-tag($USER_TAG)" | grep ^Package | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo aptitude remove-user-tag $USER_TAG $i; done

Not so bad, isn't it?