[H-GEN] What have I installed?

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Mon Feb 10 22:19:37 EST 2003


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Ewan Edwards wrote:

| Yesterday, I downloaded the tarball for a recent version of a fairly commonly 
| used piece of software (dhcp-3.0.1rc11.tar.gz) to a RH7.3 box.  After having 
| a look at the README file and running the obligatory "./configure", "make", 
| and "make install" commands (without error I might add), I now want to know 
| what files I have actually 'installed' on this box.  Can someone please tell 
| me where I should look for some kind of list of what files (including man 
| pages) have been generated and installed?
| 
| Even though this is about the ISC dhcp server, the answer is probably generic 
| and applicable to any software avalable as a source tarball.
| 
| My reasons for asking about this vary from, wanting to work out how to 
| configure and run[1] the software, to, wanting to know which files to remove 
| should I decide to un-install the software.

This is not trivial for almost all software.  Some authors
provide an uninstall target in makefiles that might (or might
not) remove everything.  Some authors provide a manifest file or
mtree input data that will tell you where everything went (or
was supposed to go).  Often these lists will be rendered wrong
by running configure with a different value for PREFIX from the
default.

In my opinion, the "best" methods are one of the following (in
order of preference):

* Learn how to understand the output of make and redirect its
  output into a file from which you can read the install lines
  and find what you want.

* Keep your locate database up to date daily.  Before starting
  the install, do "locate / > /tmp/old.list"; after the next
  locate update, do "locate / > /tmp/new.list" and compare the
  results.

* Use find and sort to produce a list of everything on the
  system before the install; repeat afterwards; compare the
  results.  (This is the same as the previous suggestion, but
  does the steps slightly differently.)

As a software author, I try to ensure that uninstalling my stuff
is at least as easy as installing it -- but there are some
problems where the installation involves configuration files
that might have other data in them and so on.  Life is not
always simple.

Greg

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