How do I uninstall ruby from my cygwin installation

Question

My cygwin installation contains the following ruby binaries, how can I uninstall these binaries since I would like to use ruby 192 on my windows vista machine

ruby.exe
rubyw.exe

Answer 1

To uninstall any package on Cygwin, run setup-x86.exe or setup-x86_64.exe (which you should already have, or you can get them here), select "ruby" under "interpreters", click the round arrow icon until it says "Uninstall", then continue. This will remove the executables and libraries and take care of any dependencies. You could remove the files directly, but that might leave the system in an inconsistent state, and you might miss something.

Cygwin doesn't seem to have Ruby 1.9.2 yet, unfortunately (NOTE: I wrote this several years ago and I'm not currently able to check). How do you intend to install it? If you're going to install a pure Windows (non-Cygwin) version of ruby, you may not need to uninstall the Cygwin version. For example, I have both Cygwin Perl and ActiveState Perl on my Windows 7 system; I use one from the Cygwin environment, the other from the Windows environment.

Or I suppose you could build ruby 1.9.2 from source under Cygwin; in that case, yes, you would want to uninstall the Cygwin ruby installation first.

(As I write this update, the latest version of Ruby is 2.3.2.)

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/ has more information about ways to install ruby (but nothing specific about Cygwin).