Match wildcard during zypper remove?

Question

I'm trying to remove an old kernel from openSUSE. The openSUSE version is Tumbleweed (20191128), and the old kernel is 5.1.16.

The manpage for Zypper is here. It looks like Zypper supports wildcards (if I am parsing the manpage correctly), but I am not getting the syntax correct. I am not sure how to tell the package manager to match the wildcard during the remove.

How do I tell Zypper to remove packages matching *5.1.16*?

---

> ls /boot/
boot.readme                  sysctl.conf-5.1.16-1-default
config-5.1.16-1-default      sysctl.conf-5.3.12-1-default
config-5.3.12-1-default      System.map-5.1.16-1-default
grub2                        System.map-5.3.12-1-default
initrd                       vmlinux-5.1.16-1-default.gz
initrd-5.1.16-1-default      vmlinux-5.3.12-1-default.gz
initrd-5.3.12-1-default      vmlinuz
symvers-5.1.16-1-default.gz  vmlinuz-5.1.16-1-default
symvers-5.3.12-1-default.gz  vmlinuz-5.3.12-1-default

> sudo zypper remove *5.1.16*
Loading repository data...
Warning: No repositories defined. Operating only with the installed resolvables. Nothing can be installed.
Reading installed packages...
'*5.1.16*' not found in package names. Trying capabilities.
No provider of '*5.1.16*' found.
Resolving package dependencies...

Nothing to do.

> sudo zypper remove '*5.1.16*'
Loading repository data...
Warning: No repositories defined. Operating only with the installed resolvables. Nothing can be installed.
Reading installed packages...
'*5.1.16*' not found in package names. Trying capabilities.
No provider of '*5.1.16*' found.
Resolving package dependencies...

Nothing to do.

Answer 1

The wildcards work only for package names, not for version numbers:

To update individual packages, specify one or more package names. You can use the * and ? wildcard characters in the package names to specify multiple packages matching the pattern.

you could however do something like:

rpm -qa | grep "5.1.16" | xargs zypper rm