I have a program that has stopped working.

When I try to uninstall it (rpm -e), rpm claims it is not installed.

When I try to re-install it (rpm -i, U or F), rpm claims it's already installed.

ARGH! I manually removed the app's files/directories, but rpm still claims it's installed.

How do I force rpm to remove this app, so I can re-install it?

BTW The app is webmin...

Thanks for your time!

Do you run rpm -e webmin, rpm -e webmin-<version>, or rpm -e webmin-<version>.rpm? Try second, I guess. Also try rpm -i --force and rpm -e --force on it. After first it will be installed, after second - hopefully, removed.

Thanks for the reply. I've tried all variations I can think of:

rpm -e --force --allfiles webmin-1.270-1.noarch.rpm

Also tried -i, -U and -F with and without --force and --allfiles.

Also tried --justdb too.

DOH, I should'a said I'm running CentOS 4.3 latest with all patches installed.

I'm about ready to install webmin from source, but my rpm db for that app will still be messed up. I need to repair the rpm db I'm guessing

What about
rpm --force -e webmin-1.270-1
?

Tried that, tried everything I could find.

Tried -vv -rebuilddb too..

Screw it, I just installed the app from source, works fine now. To hell with rpm, after all these years, it still sucks.

This might help someone....I had the same problem, and --force can only be used on install (so said the error message ) but I did finally get it to uninstall when I listed EVERY file separately.

I did qa/grep first to get the list of files, copied it to a text editor and took out all the line returns, making a long list with just a space between each item.

Pasted it back into the command line as part of

rpm -e <long list of files>

...and voila! it was uninstalled. What a relief, after much frustration. Hope that helps someone!

I was thinking of doing something like that, but I was hoping rpm had a *smarter* solution.

Thanks for that reply, I'll keep that in mind the next time rpm takes a dump on me