What happens when you try to uninstall a package that doesn't exist in your project?

Question

Rather than typing npm run lint I accidentally wrote npm un lint . I understand that un is a synonym for uninstall , but no package lint ever existed in our package.json .

The command line says it's added 5 packages and removed 13. The package.json hasn't changed though, and as far as I can tell neither has package-lock.json .

Running 'npm list | grep lint' only shows eslint, and lint-staged, both of which I believe are still installed.

Running npm i doesn't install anything new.

How do I find out what happened, and what packages were added/removed?

Answer 1

there are 2 scopes, namely global and local . usually, the execution of npm turns to the local and then turn to the global.

in your case, the npm un did not follow any local scope options, such as --save , so you probably operated on the global scope.

that is why you do not see any changes to the package-lock.json