All right, I wasn't too neat and tidy when I started working on thlis linux box as a newbie 3 long months ago, so now I have an interesting question.

The box was not connected directly to the internet, so I used another computer to download source code from the internet, and then ftp'd it over. The tar files ended up in /home/myname. I then untar'd them right there, creating a new directory /home/myname/mysource.

The question is this.... If I ran configure, make, and make install from the /home/myname/mysource directory, instead of moving the source to a smarter place, does that make the directory /home/myname/mysource critical to the operation of the new program I installed from the source? (in other words, could I delete the myname user and still have the program installed from /home/myname/mysource work correctly?)

Thanks for the help
-Derek

For most programs I think yes. The only program I've installed where I needed to keep the source directory was Webmin. Even that was solved by installing with a command line option. So I think you'll be safe if you remove the source directory.