How do I cleanly remove ruby 1.8.7 from CentOS 5?

Question

How can I cleanly remove my ruby version 1.8.7 from CentOS 5? I installed it by downloading the source code and performed a make.

Solution 1

You shouldn't install software this way.
Removing software which was installed like this may be dangerous:

1. unpack the same ruby to /tmp
2. run:

    ./configure --prefix=/tmp/somedir    # by default prefix points to /usr/local
    make
    make install    # this will install ruby in /tmp/somedir instead of where you've installed it
    cd /tmp/somedir
    find . -type f -exec rm -i /usr/local{} \;    # Use without -i if you are shure
    find . -type d -exec rm -ir /usr/local{} \;

I hope this will help you

Solution 2

You could also try the technique from this question. Basically look for .installed.list in the directory you built ruby in. This should have a list of all the files installed. One way to remove them all would be

cat .installed.list | xargs rm

Note that this will only delete files, not directories. I guess you could also do

cat .installed.list | xargs rmdir

after the first command. That should clean up the directories aswell. And rmdir will not remove a directory if it still contains files, so it should be safe ...

Solution 3

This works for me.

more .installed.list | xargs rm -rfv

Comments

[ewwhite]

Interesting idea. You could also use the list of files generated in /tmp/somedir and manually remove the bits from the real installation tree. Either way, the fake installation is an interesting idea.

[user9517]

You may need to run the cat .installed.list | xargs rmdir several times to get rid of all the directories it creates.

[HUB]

Or use something like "cat .installed.list | while read F; do test -f $F && rm -r $F; done"