Erase multiple packages using rpm or yum

Question

I was given access to a server with 50+ php rpms installed. I\'m trying to remove them all.

Basically, I\'m trying to combine these two commands:

rpm -qa         


        

Answer 1

The usual tool for this job is xargs:

rpm -qa | grep 'php' | xargs rpm -e

This will call rpm -e with all packages named in the standard input of xargs as arguments.