Manually removing ubuntu or debian package

Ran into an issue where a package was only partially removed from an ubuntu system - have no clue why.. but it was in a loop.. "apt-get -f install" would try to remove packagex and fail due to not existant post-remove script.

Thanks to this post you can manually remove an ubuntu/debian package doing the following:

First try:

dpkg -P packagex

Likely this will still fail so do:

dpkg -L packagex

this will give you a list of files to delete when the next step is done.

Then go to the directory:

/var/lib/dpkg/info

and delete the file:

packagex.postrm

and do:

apt-get remove --purge packagex
OR
apt-get -f install

to finish up, remove all files you found in the 'dpkg -L' step, and directories specific to packagex.

Then run apt-get update