How do I delete all packages which match a certain pattern?

1. Use apt-get, not aptitude, and use regular expressions.

2. In a regular expression, . mean any character, and * means zero or more times. So the expression libreoffice.* matches any package name containing the string libreoffice, followed by any number of characters.

3. Surround the regular expression with single quotes to avoid the shell interpreting the asterisk. (If you had a file named libreoffice.example for example in your current directory, the shell would replace libreoffice.* with libreoffice.example, so you have to use single quotes to stop this behaviour.)

Result:

sudo apt-get remove 'libreoffice.*'

An alternative is:

dpkg -l | grep libreoffice | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -n1 echo

This will list out all the packages matching libreoffice. When you've confirmed that they're all the ones you wish to get rid of, run the following command... with caution:

dpkg -l | grep libreoffice | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -n1 sudo apt-get purge -y

The idea:

1. Get the system to list out all installed packages
2. Filter to show only the ones matching libreoffice
3. Filter to show only the column with the package name
4. Run the purge command on each of those packages

Aptitude has support for global patterns, and another pretty cool matches like this:

aptitude remove '?and(?name(libreoffice), name(3.6), ~i)' libreoffice-debian-menus

This will match any package that has in it's name libreoffice and 3.6 and also it's installed (that's what the ~i stands for.