How to uninstall an application which was installed from a Linux Installer?

Question

My server is CentOS release 5.2 (Final).

How do I uninstall an application which was installed from a Linux Installer, that is extension of type .bin?

For example: I installed an application called Mono using Linux Installer and now I want to uninstall this application.

If it's a RPM installation, we can use 'rpm -e' and if it's installed from source we can use 'make uninstall'. Similarly, what is the equivalent way of uninstalling an application installed from a Linux Installer (.bin)?

NOTE: Mono is a cross platform, open source .NET development framework

Answer 1

Installers of this sort do not typically have a standard way of uninstalling themselves. You'll want to refer to any documentation that came with the installer, or perhaps take a look for any README's it installed. Some installers of that sort have an uninstall option, others install a binary/script that does the trick.

Speaking particularly of Mono, however, from what I can tell they offer RPMs/a Yum repository for RHEL/CentOS. Was this installer a 3rd party product or is it a relic of an earlier way of doing things?

Answer 2

If the mono installer supports a "test install" where it doesn't write anything to disk, run it that way and pipe into a file the output of where it's putting all the files. Then feed that output into a rm -rf script.

You could also just reinstall, if you don't care about possibly screwing up your conf file. Then just write a simple bash script with a for() that reads every line in the output file and delete each file one by one.