I have somehow very badly messed up my intallation of mysql and need to reinstall. I read the manual looking for unintall instructions, but found none. Does anyone know what directories to delete to completely remove it?

First check whether rpm installed MySQL by typing the command "rpm -qil mysql". If MySQL is installed by rpm then you may remove the package using the "rpm --remove mysql" command I believe. Check the man pages.

If MySQL wasn't installed using rpm then you may delete it (providing you have root privileges) using the recursive delete command. However, make sure that the MySQL server isn't running and killing it if it is.

# ps -ef | grep mysql
# kill <process ID of mysql server>
# cd /usr/local
# /bin/rm -fr ./mysql

The example assumes that you have installed MySQL in /usr/local/mysql...

Thanks for the help, now all is well