[H-GEN] What have I installed?
Greg Black
gjb at gbch.net
Mon Feb 10 22:19:37 EST 2003
[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
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
--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'. See http://www.humbug.org.au/
More information about the General
mailing list