Hello people!

Well, I was trying to install a package, and so I extracted it under my root dir. I saw it created dirs like /usr, /usr/share, etc. and I saw no installation in the dependences so I decided to extract from the root dir '/' (tar -xvf package.tar). It was a package optimized to my system but the software failed and I would like to find a way to 'untar', like, I give the command using the .tar file to instead of install, remove all the packages and files it installed when I extracted. Can I do this?

Thanks for the attention.

what "failed"?? please explain in more technical detail, and -xvf is the standard extract command for tar... what are you expecting it to do?

Well, thanks for answering...I would like that it instead of extracting the files of a .tar file, it seeks all the dependences and files that the .tar would be extracted to and delete them.

Like, I tar -xvf a program for a mistake from the '/' dir and it extracted many files to my /usr, /lib, etc. dirs and I would like to remove all the files it extracted. Remove all the things that tar has extracted from this package. Isn't there a way for that?

this is totally beyond the scope of what tar is meant to be able to do. tar is not a package management system, just a compression programme. You wouldn't expect winzip to do this would you?

you could potentially do something like...
but i've never tried to do that, and just in general.. that's horrible, even though it'd probably work.

hmmm thanks...well I don't expect winzip do this for me, is that just linux is the best . But ok...so the only thing to do really is prevent mistakes backuping the system before trying to install any package directly from 'tar' (packages you need to extract from the '/' because they don't have any 'make' or 'make install')?

what is this package? i've NEVER come across one that you just slap stright onto your filesystem... as you now know.. that's just horrible.

well, it is a wine one. Wine MADE for my dist (slackware 10.0). When I tried to run it, it gave me a lot of errors. I have tried to extract it under my root dir but I saw it creating dirs like /usr, /usr/bin, /usr/share, etc. so I saw I should extract from the '/'. I don't know the errors anymore because I have reinstalled my Linux when it happened, I am asking now to know if I could have done another thing. Just backuped the system before do that, is the only thing?

you should be able to place it somewhere else e.g use /usr/local/wine/ as a base instead of /

for example i added ntop to my dedicated ipcop firewall machine:

/usr/ntop/usr/bin
/usr/ntop/usr/lib
/usr/ntop/etc

and just added those to my $path variable.

hmmm right...can you just give me a a link to a guide about how to add dirs to someone's PATH? (like, root path, a user path, everyone's path, etc.) Thanks.

just edit /etc/bashrc or /etc/profile for system wide modifications

OK, your problem is that a slackware package ending in tgz isn't just a normal tar file! You're supposed to install them using the installpkg command as root:
or run pkgtool and select to install that particular package. Slackware tgz packages contain install (and uninstall) scripts as well as being compressed files.

actually, you should be able to extract and compile any slackware package if you choose. you just generally want to installpkg.