I have installed a program by tar.gz that i now want to take out completely from my pc. I read somewhere that if you type 'make uninstall' that does it. unfortunately, it does not work. can anyone please tell me how to track down and get rid of all components of this tar.gz program that i put on my system.

thanks

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=358787
Pretty much the exact same question, already answered.

in the post you said answer the question someone said you could examine the makefile, see what files it creates, and write your own "uninstall" target. please can you explain to me how to write my own 'uninstall target'?
by the way i install checkinstall now so this should not be a problem again, but i want this problem program completely removed.
thanks

I think that post was half-joking, but it can be done.
I wouldn't actually recommend building an uninstall target though...

What I would do is view the makefile with an editor and search for a line starting with "install:"
The commands after that will show what the makefile did when you ran "make install" in the first place.
From that you can probably decipher which files it created when it was installed, and can then remove them manually.

Unfortunately if you're new to reading makefiles, they can sometimes be extremely hard to decipher. With a really complex makefile it might not even be exactly as I described

But if you're lucky, it might just be a list of copy commands like this
In which case you will have an easy to read list of file locations and can easily destroy this unwanted program yourself

you could use the 'locate' command to search for all files with that program name in them then manually delete them. For example:
will give you the location of every file in your system with the name 'program' in it. Just make sure to run 'updatedb' before running 'locate' so that your system database is updated.