what is uninstall procedure for software installed via "make install" on CentOS 6.2

Question

I installed OCILIB on my CentOS 6.2 server some time ago, and now I want to install a newer version. The vendor requires an uninstall, but doesn't provide instructions. I'm guessing that's because it's trivial for people with a Linux background.

http://orclib.sourceforge.net/doc/html/group__g__install.html

If I installed this software using:

step 1: # ./configure --with-oracle-headers-path=/usr/include/oracle/11.2/client64 --with-oracle-lib-path=/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib

step 2: # make

step 3: # su root

step 4: # make install

step 5: # gcc -g -DOCI_IMPORT_LINKAGE -DOCI_CHARSET_ANSI -L/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib -lclntsh -L/usr/local/lib -locilib conn.c -o conn

How would I go about uninstalling this? I tried following this

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/delete-uninstall-software-linux-commands/

but nothing was found on my disk using rpm -qa *oci* or yum list *oci*. Maybe since it wasn't installed with yum or rpm then I shouldn't expect either of these to find it. Are there generic instructions for uninstalling software on Linux that I could use, or do the instructions really depend on the specific software? Any help much appreciated.

Answer 1

Go into the directory that the source file was in and type make uninstall if that does not work then then there may be no directions for the uninstall. In which case you will have to do it by hand which you can do by redoing the make install and watching for what it installs so you can remove those. otherwise if you know the directory where your program is installed you can remove that. Something you should always do when installing from source is to use checkinstall

What does checkinstall do?

It makes the installation and thus uninstallation much easier by using your systems package management system. It will be able to automatically generate an RPM or YUM package that can be uninstalled later by calling for example yum uninstall httpd