After apt install the package is executable but can't remove it

Question

After successfully installing the dvips package, it shows up:

Step 1)
root@CCNM-378B:~# dvips -v
This is dvips(k) 5.997 Copyright 2017 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)

But now I'm trying to remove it, and it is invisible to apt:

Step 2)
root@CCNM-378B:~# apt purge dvips
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package 'dvips' is not installed, so not removed

Now I try dpkg, which shows nothing:

root@CCNM-378B:~# dpkg -l | grep "dvips"

Finally, I tried 'apt list' and there are dvips fonts, but nothing else.

root@CCNM-378B:~# apt list | grep "dvips"
dvips-fontdata-n2bk/bionic 0.0.2001.12.12-4 all

So I search for the reverse dependencies (another package that may have installed dvips) using apt-cache:

apt-cache search dvips

and got a list. And successfully removed them all.

But doing Step 1 and 2 above, trying to remove dvips, still doesn't work, and dvips is still installed.

Answer 1

I would do:

$ dpkg -S $(which dvips)

And that should tell you the package that contains dvips.

You can from there use apt remove or dpkg --remove to remove the package

Some of the reasons that come to mind for this to happen are:

• the command being part of a package named very differently
• the package being installed outside of apt.