[Techtalk] removing installed programs

Dominik Schramm dominik.schramm at gmxpro.net
Sun Oct 26 18:11:17 EST 2003


Hi all,

Noir wrote:

>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. [...]
>
>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..
>  
>
On RedHat systems the preferred way of installing software from
source is through SRPMs. This has the big advantage that the package
shows up in rpm -qa etc.
You can build them from tarballs by writing some kind of description file
and running rpmbuild or something like this. (no further info here, I've
only done it once, it's not too untuitive).

Alternatives I have used:
alien
(http://www.kitenet.net/programs/alien/)
or installwatch
(http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/installwatch.html)

There are other scripts like installwatch, whose name I can't remember.

regards,
dominik




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