[clue-tech] uninstall procedure

[Charles W Downing]

marcus hall wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 06:18:33PM -0500, Louis Miller wrote:
>   
>> Hello,
>>
>>        I use Ubuntu. I have always gone into add/remove to uninstall
>> programs, but I never thought, until now, that all of the programs I
>> had uninstalled had been available through the Debian repositories.
>> I want to uninstall Skype. I can't go into add/remove and uncheck
>> the tick box. How do you do it?
>>
>> Louis
>>     
>
> If the programs were installed via a makefile, that is, if you built the
> program and did a "make install" to install it (or "sudo make install"),
> and *IF* you still have the directory that you built it in, chances are
> that you can do a "make uninstall" and it will remove the installed files.
>
> If you installed it by un-tarring a file (something like the command:
> "tar xf fubar.tar -C /"), then you can get the list of files from the
> tar file ("tar vf fubar.tar") and either manually remove them, or feed
> that to "xargs rm" (NB: check the file list twice or more, this could
> potentially really trash your system if you get it wrong!  It's working
> without a net.)
>
> Basically, you have to find whatever method you used to install the
> program and either perform a coresponding uninstall procedure that was
> hopefully provided with the install procedure, or else reverse engineer the
> install procedure to undo it.
>
> One last thought is to generate a list of all files owned by an installed
> package (rpm -qal on rpm based systems would do this, don't know about deb
> based systems, but there likely is some equivalent) and diff that against
> the files on your filesystem.  Then, decide which of the files are your own
> files and which are other installed programs that you want to remove.  Of
> course, this won't undo edits to system files,...
>   

I note from man dpkg the following:

-L, --listfiles package-name...
                  List files installed to your system from package-name.

I think this works OK.

> marcus hall
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>
>   

-- 
Chuck Downing
Highlands Ranch, Colorado USA 

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