How force remove when post-installation script always fail

Question

I have a custom package installed on my Ubuntu 10.10, and trying to remove it, I got:

$ sudo dpkg -r package
sub-process script post-installation installed returne an error state 127

(the message returned from the command was translated from portuguese(br).

So, I noted that on the installation script of this package, what it did was create an entry on my startup, create a folder on /opt and create a user.

I removed all it created. But now, I just want to remove it from dpkg list, because I want to make my linux like if I never installed this package.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

You may need to manually remove the package using:

sudo dpkg --purge --force-all package

Replace package with the name of the package.

Do note: its recommended to report a bug if the package is not yours or is unknown to you what the script does.

Answer 2

trying to remove xmail with dpkg --purge --force-all xmail failed because the pre-removal script was exiting with a failure attempting to stop the xmail daemon. I found the solution here:

• how to remove a package which post-installation and pre-removal script fails?

specifically, I edited /var/lib/dpkg/info/xmail.prerm and changed || exit $! to || true