What's the opposite of 'make install', ie. how do you uninstall a library in Linux?

Question

While running

./configure --prefix=/mingw

on a MinGW/MSYS system for a library I had previously run

'./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install'

I came across this message:

WARNING: A version of the Vamp plugin SDK is already installed. Expect worries and sorrows if you install a new version without removing the old one first. (Continuing)

This had me worried. What's the opposite of 'make install', ie. how is a library uninstalled in Linux? Will 'make clean' do the job, or are there other steps involved?

Answer 1

Depending on how well the makefile/configure script/autofoo magic of the program in question is the following might solve your problem:

make uninstall

The problem is that you should execute this on the source tree of the version you've got installed and with exactly the same configuration that you used for installing.

Answer 2

make clean generally only cleans built files in the directory containing the source code itself, and rarely touches any installed software.

Makefiles generally don't contain a target for uninstallation -- you usually have to do that yourself, by removing the files from the directory into which they were installed. For example, if you built a program and installed it (using make install) into /usr/local, you'd want to look through /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/libexec, /usr/local/share/man, etc., and remove the unwanted files. Sometimes a Makefile includes an uninstall target, but not always.

Of course, typically on a Linux system you install software using a package manager, which is capable of uninstalling software "automagically".

Answer 3

There is no standard unfortunately, this is one of the perils of installing from source. Some Makefiles will include an "uninstall", so

make uninstall

from the source directory may work. Otherwise, it may be a matter of manually undoing whatever the make install did.

make clean usually just cleans up the source directory - removing generated/compiled files and the like, probably not what you're after.

Answer 4

make clean removes any intermediate or output files from your source / build tree. However, it only affects the source / build tree; it does not touch the rest of the filesystem and so will not remove previously installed software.

If you're lucky, running make uninstall will work. It's up to the library's authors to provide that, however; some authors provide an uninstall target, others don't.

If you're not lucky, you'll have to manually install it. Running make -n install can be helpful, since it will show the steps that the software would take to install itself but won't actually do anything. You can then manually reverse those steps.

Answer 5

In addition to the answers already given, you can probably just reinstall the old version of the software. Apparently you had already gotten it somewhere else, so just reinstalling it should overwrite whatever you just did.