How to correctly uninstall Ruby 1.9.1

Question

Hi:) I have manually set Ruby 1.9.1. I have installed it via

./configure --prefix=/opt
make
make install

The target 'uninstall' does not exist in generated Makefile ...
How to do uninstallation correctly?

PS: I also believe that it is necessary to remove all the gems.
For this I use

#!/bin/sh
gem list --local | grep [^\*] | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | xargs gem uninstall

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with another software installed in /opt. I solved the issue by

1. creating an empty directory elsewhere (like /tmp/ruby)
2. installing exactly the same version you want to remove in this directory
3. printing a list of all files in the new location, replacing/tmp/ruby with /opt.
4. erasing the resulting list

On unix, you can first try:

$ find /tmp/ruby | sed "s/\/tmp\/ruby\//\/opt\//"

Look carefully at the list, if it seems valid, use:

$ find /tmp/ruby | sed "s/\/tmp\/ruby\//\/opt\//" | xargs rm

To really remove the files...

Answer 2

You can proceed with some tmp directory as paradigmatic suggests here.

Still, his usage of find ... | xargs rm has the following flaws:

• the list of arguments to rm will be too long most likely,
• directories will be included in the list causing rm to fail in the middle, so you'll end up with some files deleted and some not.

I'd use rm as an -exec option within find instead:

find /tmp/ruby -depth -type f -exec rm /opt/{} \;

-type f selects only regular files (you're using rm, not rmdir).

In general I find better to use find -exec instead of find|xargs.

[edit: falling back to xargs]

Upon reading the comments I realized and checked that xargs is actually faster - doesn't fork rm subprocess for each file matching the criteria but feeds rm command with arguments in batches. The too-long-list error I mentioned has been fixed quite a time ago.

Moreover, if you drop -type f condition then rm will print error for directories but delete everything else. This is a good thing as you will have an info about possibly empty directiories for free.