Removing Blackarch
I installed Blackarch on top of my ordinary Arch install for the Oregon CTF a few weeks ago.
Now it’s taking up a lot of space on my system and I no longer need it around.
None of the Google queries I’ve tried have discussed how to get rid of it, and I’ve had to resort to reading the install script to figure out how to make its repositories go away. Here’s what I learned.
First, assuming that you used strap.sh to install all of the blackarch packages like I did, you can uninstall them simply by chopping the package names out of the list of all blackarch packages and instructing Pacman to remove them:
$ pacman -Sl | grep blackarch | cut -f 2 -d " " | xargs sudo pacman -Rn
- pacman -Sl searches all of the package databases and lists their contents. The output will be of the form reponame packagename version.
- grep blackarch narrows that list to only those packages with blackarch in their titles
- cut -f 2 -d " " says “I want only the second field, and fields are delineated by the space character”. So far, we’ve selected the package name of each package whose listing contains the string “blackarch”.
- xargs executes the given command on each item in its standard in. The pipes (|) each attach stdout of the preceding command to stdin of the following one. Xargs is necessary here because Pacman takes its arguments only on the command line, and does not gracefully handle taking args on stdin.
- pacman -Rn says “Remove the given package, and don’t worry about backing up its files”. I passed the -n flag because one of my main reasons for removing blackarch is to save space on my rather small SSD, so I don’t want to keep around a bunch of backups for the configurations of programs I never ended up using.
Even after removing all Blackarch packages, the Blackarch repository entry remains in pacman.conf. To remove it, open /etc/pacman.conf and remove the blackarch repo, which will probably be the final two lines of the file. Those lines will look something like this:
[blackarch]
Server = http://mirror.team-cymru.org/blackarch/$repo/os/$arch
And now it’s gone. No more packages to update, and no more repo to check every time updates get installed.