How to completely remove a package in Debian?

Question

I tried to use this:

aptitude remove denyhosts

And it seemed successfully but after a reboot after I use:

ps aux | grep "denyhosts"

I see denyhosts is still loaded after startup.

So what am I supposed to do so that I can stop and destroy it once and for all? "aptitude remove something" isn't meant for uninstalling?

Answer 1

Will remove a package and all configuration files.

apt-get --purge remove package

If it is still giving you issues, try reinstalling then purging:

apt-get --reinstall install package
apt-get --purge remove package

You still might need to:

killall package

Reboot and if it started again run:

update-rc.d remove package

Story Time: Once for some unknown reason, when I purge removed ejabberd; it continued running. I trusted apt-get to kill it and remove it. It didn't. Needless to say, it eventually filled up my entire /var with a ramdisk log file. It continued until I killed all of the ejabberd processes and that quickly resolved the issue. So it taught me to always be sure that apt-get worked and killed all needed processes.

Answer 2

In case you prefer aptitude:

# aptitude purge denyhosts

purge should also remove the init scripts, so the update-rc.d step is not really necessary.

Another thing that is possible that another package also provides a daemon called denyhosts. To search for all installed packages that contain files with denyhosts in them:

$ dpkg -S denyhosts