[Techtalk] removing installed programs

Carla Schroder carla at bratgrrl.com
Sun Oct 26 09:00:51 EST 2003


On Sunday 26 October 2003 6:31 am, Noir wrote:
> Ok, this might sound a bit stupid. But here it goes:
>
> When we want to un-install a program in RHL we usually use rpm -e & the
> rest is taken care of. But say we have installed a program from the source
> (gz, Z, bzip2, tar, make, makefile, etc) and now the whole file is
> scattered around the file system. Say, some files are in /usr/local/bin ||
> /usr/bin && some are in /etc/ (conf files) && yet some are in
> /etc/program_name/....|| /usr/share/doc/program_name/
>
> So, if we want to delete/ remove the program altogether how will we do it?
>
> I know we can use "locate" then "unlink/ rmdir" in perl or bash or even
> hand hack. But am looking for s/t automated like rpm -e..
>
> Thanks in advance for any kind of help!
>

Some programs include 'make clean', or 'make uninstall'. Try those first.  
Otherwise there is no automated way to remove source-built programs. That's 
why RPM and debs came about.

Really clever persons generate lists of files before and after installing a 
program, then compare with diff. Sometimes there are installation logs that 
list installed files, or the program documentation will list all the pieces.

Another thing you can do is capture the output of 'make install' into a file, 
and hang on to that when it's installation time, that should tell everything:

make install | tee filename

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Carla Schroder
www.tuxcomputing.com
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