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massivefermion
Asked: 2016-08-05 04:11:45 +0800 CST

Make install unsuccessful, manually delete files?

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I tried to install something from source because there was no other option. I had to first make one part and then cmake and make another part of the software. But the second make was unsuccessful and I couldn't find out how to make it work. So now I just want to remove the software. My question is, will it do any kind of damage if I simply rm -r the directory containing the installation files?

P.S. The software doesn't provide a rule for make uninstall.

Thanks

make

1 Answers

  1. If you never got to the "make install" part of any of the components of your installation, then there's nothing to "uninstall". You can simply delete the source tree folder as you will.

    If you did manage to "make install" something, run the install command again for that component and redirect the output to a file: 

    <prompt:/location> make install > installLog.txt 2>&1

    This will redirect both STDOUT and STDERR to the file. Then, use the installLog.txt to find where the files were installed, and manually delete them.

    Alternatively, you can go through and edit out anything but the install paths in the installLog.txt, and then redirect the output of that file's content to a delete command:

    Example content of installLog.txt

    /usr/lib/pandas/inst.lib
/lib/pandas/inst.lib
/usr/local/bin/pandas.bin

    Delete command

    <prompt:/location> cat installLog.txt |xargs rm -r

    Explanation

    • cat -- prints the content of installLog.txt to STDOUT (standard out)
    • | -- pipes the output of the cat command to the next command
    • xargs -- Takes the output of a redirect and passes it to the next command
    • rm -- you know what it does

    Notes

    If you can help it, for the love of the gods don't use source installations to install things. Use the system's provided apt-get package management system if you can. This sort of process is dangerous, outdated and can conflict and interfere with the system's already installed packages.

    I'm sure there was a justified reason for doing this, but as a Systems Admin I highly recommend against manually installing anything source based, both for your future sanity, and for future proofing the install base.

    If you insist on doing source installations, then I recommend two things to make your life infinitely easier:

    1. Learn about docker. While it's not a perfect technology, it will save you some pain and suffering, because you're able to isolate your source installations in its own environment. You can use docker to run daemons as well.

    2. Alternatively, learn to better use the configure script of your installations, so that you can actively participate in the install path process. Most configure scripts will allow for some install flag similar to "--install-path=/my/custom/install/path" or similar. For the great majority of them, you can run:

      ./configure --help

    This will give you information on how to customize the installation. This will also cause later problems when trying to integrate multiple packages because you'll have to customize them as well to point to the location of the already installed dependency. That is another reason that you should stick to the system's package management as much as you can.

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