Please help to find out how to uninstall Mplayer and other programs that is installed by compiling source files(./configure, make , make install)

Each one is different, so they all put programs/libraries/whatever, in different places. The only way to know where ALL the files are, is to look in the makefile, and see where things get copied when you do a make install.

1 members found this post helpful.

Try "make uninstall".

1 members found this post helpful.

You can also take a look at rpm's for those packages, and see what files are inside.

1 members found this post helpful.

kris_rocks!
PLEASE READ the linux documentation !!!
the answer is

0 members found this post helpful.

I am currently at workplace. I will try make uninstall once I reach my home. Hope it will work! Thanks!

It will only work if the makefile has the "uninstall" option in it. Again, each program is different...

1 members found this post helpful.

You mean the "uninstall" target. The folks who maintain MPlayer know how to do things right.

From "mplayer-export-2010-02-03/Makefile":

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, tried things posted here in combination and found a lot of good stuff.

Much as TBOne says all apps are different in installation. I cannot find any makefile for an app and also did more <filename> on all and sundry files I could see under usr/local/App. No result. Did make --help and could not get uninstall in there. So now, does Linux work with something like the Windows registry or will I be able to uninstall by simply and only doing rm -rf <filename> on all found under locate App?

For what it's worth, I found this link when looking for a solution to file names with spaces in them. See bigrigdriver's post of about six months ago.

http://www.freebookcentre.net/unix-b...ogramming.html

Searching first really works! And I'm getting the hang of it.

Two things wrong:

1. You hijacked a thread
2. This thread is about uninstalling MPlayer after building it from source

Admins can move relevant part of this thread and separate it.

As for the registry question, NO, Linux has no centralized registry, configuration files for applications are totally separate from other applications, but they are largely placed in /etc folder and it's sub-folders. So if you delete main files but not delete config files, nothing bad is going to happen unless some other application is dependent on it.

I suggest @Carsto, that you first read some relevant book on Linux and then try to mess with uninstalling applications.

1 members found this post helpful.

I really do not feel good about this, I'll avoid it in future.
I'm out of here.

Thank you for the other information. Shouldn't uninstalling apps be as simple as installing them?

IT IS
if from source
from yum ( fedora )
very easy

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you, JohnVV.

I've tried all those and weren't entirely successful. In some cases there were reams of files left over to be deleted by hand. Even that was unsuccessful in one case.

To double check I used the Dolphin GUI File manager (FC12) and cd /folder/file...in terminal. These reported that all the files were gone, yet when I used locate in terminal there were seven files that persisted. I could not cd-enter the folders in those paths but thrice deleted those files with the full paths. rm -rf /usr/local/folder/file et al. They came back.

In the end I deleted my hard disc; fdisk, mkfs, fsck, but the re-install problem persists. I made a mistake in syntax when using the dd command but will retry that shortly - to entirely over-write the disc with zeroes.

Problem with locate command is that it is not real-time updated. It is run only once a day, at night mostly. You need to run command updatedb to refresh database for locate command.

So I guess you DID delete those files, but locate was still not avare of that change.

1 members found this post helpful.