Hi. First post from a n00b here.
I've just begun trying to tinker with Linux (FC4), especially with installing programs: the ./configure, make, & make install routine.

Now my question is: how does one uninstall a program after it's been installed?

Is there a quick way to do such thing, ie. deleting the folder that the program was installed on?

Or does one have to worry about the dependencies, etc. that the program may have hooked onto or modified?

Thanks!

Hi,

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=358787

regards

If you compile the programs like you are now, then you can usually just enter "make uninstall". But you need to make sure you keep the compile directory on your computer . If you've deleted it, then you can always just delete the directories that the programs got installed to (download the source again, and check to see where it installed files to).

You can also try out checkinstall; you'll need to download it if you don't already have it, and run checkinstall as root after the "make" command. If you're familiar with Windows, then what checkinstall basically does is create a single install file (package) from the many source files. You can then mess with that package with whatever package management software comes with your distribution.

Personally I think it makes application management easier, as you can see in one place all the apps you have installed, and remove if you want, without having to allocate space on yoru hard drive for a bunch of source code directories. Of course, you can also create your own package manually (relatively).

The best way to uninstall would be to get the precompiled package for your distribution. If you use a more popular distribution, you should be able to find one.

edit: or...you can go to that thread

which is of course a thread telling you at length that you should have used checkinstall to install the thing in the first place...not very useful if you're already trying to get rid of it :-).

As you installed from source the app won't alter any existing files on your system...a source tar ball contains just the source for that app not the dependancies as well. Therefore, besides make uninstall, you could just delete the dir and it would be gone. As for removing any extra files that it writes to your system then I think you're stuck with the longhand method of checking exactly what those are via the readme/maintainers webby and sitting down with a few rm -rf commands.

For what its worth I prefer the ./configue, make, make install route.

Same for RPM's debs etc..