Command line glob expansion broken-ish

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 19, 2021, at 20:43, Bill Cole wrote:

> Example:
> 
> shiny:~ root# port installed *proto
> The following ports are currently installed:
>  xorg-xorgproto @2021.4_0
> shiny:~ root# port installed |fgrep proto
>  xorg-compositeproto @0.4.2_0 (active)
>  xorg-damageproto @1.2.1_0 (active)
>  xorg-fixesproto @5.0_0 (active)
>  xorg-kbproto @1.0.7_0 (active)
>  xorg-randrproto @1.5.0_0 (active)
>  xorg-renderproto @0.11.1_0 (active)
>  xorg-xineramaproto @1.2.1_0 (active)
>  xorg-xorgproto @2021.4_0
> 
> I do understand the issue, I think: the glob is being expanded against the names of ports that still exist in the current ports tree, not the ones that have been installed but have been superseded by (in this case) an omnibus port that won't activate because of the existing installations.
> 
> The obvious workaround was to manually uninstall each of the zombie ports individually. I wonder if anyone else considers this a bug?

I believe that's behaving as designed, so it's not a bug.

You can identify what you call zombie ports and what we call obsolete ports with:

port installed obsolete

You can uninstall them with

sudo port uninstall obsolete

You can also periodically use

sudo port reclaim

to reclaim disk space from things that are no longer needed, which might include obsolete ports unless you had explicitly requested them to be installed.