This post is older than a year. Consider some information might not be accurate anymore.
apt-get remove allows to uninstall software packages for Debian and Ubuntu. Some software may still have configuration stored on your system. If you don’t have used apt-get purge, the config files still resides on your Debian installation. This post illustrates how to remove these packages.
Show all removed debian packages with configuration files:
dpkg --list | grep ^rc
Example output
tan@cinhtau:~$ dpkg --list | grep ^rc
rc libcouchdb-glib-1.0-2 0.6.3-0ubuntu2 GLib-based API for CouchDB
rc libdesktopcouch-glib-1.0-2 0.6.3-0ubuntu2 Glib-based API for Desktopcouch
rc libgtkhtml-editor0 1:3.29.6.is.3.28.3-0ubuntu2 HTML rendering/editing library - editor widget
rc libpst4 0.6.41-0ubuntu4 Shared library needed by the readpst utilities, and
Use awk to get the package name and use it as input for the purge command.
sudo dpkg --purge $(dpkg --list | grep ^rc | awk '{ print $2; }')
Another way to achieve the same goal. xargs has the advantage, that it can batch up the arguments to allow one command to process lots of items.
dpkg --list | grep '^rc\b' | awk '{ print $2 }'\
| xargs sudo dpkg -P
