uninstalling preinstalled packages
 

I did a search and everything I read said do a make uninstall in the program directory if the program is from source. Ok I understand that no problem. But what if the program was installed with the distro? I have Slackware 8.0 and would like to uninstall emacs so I can install the newer one. Is this the best way or can I just install over the existing? Thanks for the help.

That would be :
The 4 options are:
-copy= copies to preserved package directory,creating a tree of original pkg without removing it.

-keep=used for debugging

-preserve=same as -copy but removes original pkg

-warn=shows what will happen if the pkg is removed

Most of this is cribbed from the Slackware essentials manual to help make this reply more understandable to someone besides myself:D
Note:you can only use one option at a time but you can list more than one pkg. I hope this helps.
lynch

Use pkgtool. Check out this page.

Oh,yeah.
lynch

rpm -qa |grep emacs |xargs rpm --uninstall might work too, dunno, i've never tried it.

try it with and with out the xargs