installation - How to uninstall software by the Linux shell?

07
2014-07
  • AndreaNobili

    I am yet not a "Linux Guy" and I have the following problem

    I installed some software from the source (compiling it), now I have to uninstall it.

    What have I to do in the command line to uninstall it?

  • Answers
  • slhck

    If you still have the source files, you could be lucky and make provides an uninstall target:

    make uninstall
    

    If not, you'll have to manually inspect what make installed and remove these files. You can run:

    make -n install
    

    to see what is done during installation, and then use rm to remove the files that were installed.


    In the future, instead of doing make install, you could use checkinstall instead. On Debian-based distributions, this would generate a .deb file which is installed like any other package, and which you can then later remove with Synaptic or dpkg.

    Basically, instead of sudo make install, just call sudo checkinstall.


  • Related Question

    fedora - How to uninstall software in Linux
  • Questioner

    how to uninstall software in linux. I am facing issues installing No machine setup(NX)


  • Related Answers
  • Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

    rpm -e <package> or yum remove <package> if it was installed via a package. Otherwise make uninstall or judicious use of rm.

  • Saif Bechan

    If I want to uninstall a program quickly and I only know part of the name I find the following commands always nice.

    Lets say I want to remove only tomcat from my system, I use:

    rpm -qa | grep "tomcat" | xargs rpm -e

    If I want to remove tomcat and all its dependencies I use:

    rpm -qa | grep "tomcat" | xargs yum erase -y

    There are all kinds of variations on these commands, and they can be quite powerful.

  • Zsub

    checkout yum --help or man yum