[Techtalk] Uninstalling programs in Linux

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 06:50:45PM -0700 or thereabouts, Marian Routh wrote:
> I logged in as root and typed rpm -e /home/me/name-of-rpm-package and  
> the console told me the package was not installed!  Which it is.  So I 
> tried just calling it by its name, SOT_Office.  Same response.  I 
> looked in SOT's readme, and there's nothing about how to remove it (I 
> guess they couldn't conceive of that).

I don't know about this program, but rpm itself isn't helpful here.
Different invocations of rpm want different things as the argument.

You get your rpm as packagename.rpm. It may contain program1, program2
and so on.

For installing, you tell it the pathname and filename:
	rpm --install /path/to/location/of/packagename.rpm

For querying the installed package, you need just the package name:
	rpm -q packagename

For querying "which rpm did this come from?", you may need the path:
	rpm -qf /path/to/program1

For erasing an rpm, you want the name of the package:
	rpm -e packagename	(like a plain query)

If those are the only options you ever need, this makes no sense.
If you start messing with rpm more, it all begins to fit together;
but most people don't need to and so it remains ridiculously
confusing.

> Then I tried kpackage and SOT showed up twice.  The first one returned 
> an error of "can't find readme in file index" and several other files.  
> Then it disappeared from the kpackage listing.  So I clicked on the 
> other one, and it tells me SOT isn't installed.  And yet it is still 
> living there in its folder in my home directory, taking up a lot of 
> space.  Help! Help!

If it shows up twice, did it somehow get installed twice? This can
be a pest to remove. You'd need rpm -e --allmatches packagename
(and so of course, you need to find out what the package thinks it's
called).

Telsa