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I am rather new to Docker, I have recently started running ubuntu container, and stopped it gracefully a few days later (I do not see it using "docker ps"). When I tried to remove ubuntu image using

docker rmi ubuntu

I got the following error:

Error response from daemon: conflict: unable to remove repository reference "ubuntu" (must force) - container 65c315b169b8 is using its referenced image 747cb2d 60bbe

Can I use "--force" to force a removal of the image,

docker rmi ubuntu --force

Or is there a graceful/safer way to do it?

Answers

By default docker ps will only show running containers. You can show the stopped ones using docker ps --all.

You can then remove the container first with docker rm <CONTAINER_ID>

If you want to remove all of the containers, stopped or not, you can achieve this from a bash prompt with

$ docker rm $(docker ps --all -q)

The -q switch returns only the IDs