Whilst we are here and I have deviated off topic, why not one more pet peeve related to tar.

I also think that 'tar xvf archive' (v = Verbose[list on extraction—in this context]) is almost always pointless. I don't need a list of files flying past my screen as I extract. If I know the archive and its contents, I can just extract. If I do not know what is inside, I should have run a 'tar tf archive' first, before I committed to extraction. Because if I was worried about over writing files … then too late. The 'x' (extract) just made that happen, while I watched it (and probably screamed at myself for not doing a 'tf' in the first place).

Actually, the problem with this, is that your "-f" only matches "regular" files, i.e. not symlinks. Thus any symlinks within a package would not be deleted by your suggestion. You could expand the test to [ -f "$f" -o -h "$f" ] and it will be better but of course there are other file types that could potentially be included in a tar archive. This is why I do "! -type d" in my find command. I am looking for any type of file that is not a directory. You would need the equivalent of that to be entirely correct.

@MadeInGermany One other issue with your suggestion is that you only covered how to remove files and didn't talk about installation in the first place. This is important because there are two obvious ways to install. Extract the package over the / directory or extract the files somewhere else and move them into place. Only the latter is viable IMHO because installable tar packages like this tend to contain both package specific files (+directories) and shared (read: 'system') directories.

Distributions can have different defaults for permissions and ownership, so even if the author of such a package does their best to use sensible defaults, there might still be wrong for some distributions. Having an ownership or permissions issues with package specific files is a lesser issue, with the most likely problem being with the package does not run correctly. Having ownership or permissions issues with "system directories" (e.g. usr) could be catastrophic. You might not even be able to boot. Thus the user should always extract somewhere else and move files into place, creating only the needed new directories with distro defaults. This is something that is easy with cpio (or a tar pipe). To accurately select files to move, you are likely to use a find command and if you are doing that you might as well create the removal log at that point anyway. You also get the benefit of not having to keep around the old install package just for the sake of helping you remove.

P.S. Since I wrote my answer above, I realise there is an even better find command for creating a log. You could create a nice null separated log like this:

This has the advantage that it also handles any really weirdly named files (i.e. not just spaces in their names but even stuff like names that include line breaks).

Then to uninstall you would simply issue:

I use this method for the instructions in the sample tar package I offered to the SpiderOak team.

This thread is about uninstall/delete.

I wouldn't go as far as extracting to a different location, and use a subsequent relocation command. Every (further) prilileged command bares a (further) risk.
But I second your suggestion to first run a tar tvf and look at the files and their owners/permissions. Do not blindly trust anyone/anything that is not you/made by you!

Removing a directory is not easy. One should first ensure it is not provided by a package, before removing it with rmdir.
Perhaps one should do this even for plain files and other file types (before removing them with rm).

Who said anything about extracting privileged? Extract as a normal user, install with cpio (privileged) changing ownership of files to root (and default group for root) on the fly. Read my example.

(and make sure it is empty).

But again, I covered all that in my first response.

Better yet, do that before you install. This is why it is best to talk about install and uninstall together.

For anyone wondering how I got to this:

Issuing the following inside a directory of the extracted tar contents, will get you in the ballpark of what might be a non-standard directory.:

The regex based of a very quick peruse of the FHS 3.0. Of course there are lots of shared directories not covered by FHS but rather other standards like Fdo/XDG (e.g. applications and icons directories in share or the xdg directory and subdirectories in etc). So I considered expanding the regex further but at some point I realised I was overthinking it. If you have a passing familiarity with packaging and 'normal directories' on a Linux distributions, it is quite easy to see that /opt/SpiderOakONE (and its subdirectories) and /usr/share/doc/SpiderOakONE are the odd ones out.

And this actually gives a nice rule of thumb, "the unique directories are generally named after the package" (at least at their highest level) and are thus are actually very easy to spot, even without any fancy regex. In fact, they are easy to find even after install IMHO. Just run a find command on common install locations with "-type d" and "-empty" and look out for the obvious.

Once you have found the "highest level" package specific directories, just approach deleting them after removing the files and based on greatest depth first. Then they are simple to clear down. In addition, you can't go too far wrong with "rmdir" commands. They are pretty safe because they will not remove a directory that contains something. Also even if you do delete something that should have remained as a shared directory (because it happened to be empty right now), the next install of a software that needs it will generally just re-create it without issue.

But again... you could just ignore the directories altogether because empty directories generally cause no problems and have negligible space requirements. So I would personally always focus on the files, first and foremost. These can be scattered all over the place, don't always have obvious names and are (usually) unique. They are also the ones taking up all the space. Handle them and you are generally good.