What's the opposite of 'make install', i.e. how do you uninstall a library in Linux?

Question

make clean removes any intermediate or output files from your source / build tree. However, it only affects the source / build tree; it does not touch the rest of the filesystem and so will not remove previously installed software.

If you're lucky, running make uninstall will work. It's up to the library's authors to provide that, however; some authors provide an uninstall target, others don't.

If you're not lucky, you'll have to manually uninstall it. Running make -n install can be helpful, since it will show the steps that the software would take to install itself but won't actually do anything. You can then manually reverse those steps.

If sudo make uninstall is unavailable:

In a Debian based system, instead of (or after*) doing make install you can run sudo checkinstall to make a .deb file that gets automatically installed. You can then remove it using the system package manager (e.g. apt/synaptic/aptitude/dpkg). Checkinstall also supports creating other types of package, e.g. RPM.

See also http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/162 and some basic checkinstall usage and debian checkinstall package.

---

*: If you're reading this after having installed with make install you can still follow the above instructions and do a dpkg -r $PACKAGE_NAME_YOU_CHOSEN afterwards.

If you have a manifest file which lists all the files that were installed with make install you can run this command which I have from another answer:

cat install_manifest.txt | xargs echo rm | sh

If you have sudo make install you will need to add a sudo to your uninstall:

cat install_manifest.txt | xargs echo sudo rm | sh

Depending on how well the makefile/configure script/autofoo magic of the program in question is the following might solve your problem:

make uninstall

The problem is that you should execute this on the source tree of the version you've got installed and with exactly the same configuration that you used for installing.

How to uninstall after "make install"

Method #1 (make uninstall)

Step 1: You only need to follow this step if you've deleted/altered the build directory in any way: Download and make/make install using the exact same procedure as you did before.

Step 2: try make uninstall.

cd $SOURCE_DIR 
sudo make uninstall

If this succeeds you are done. If you're paranoid you may also try the steps of "Method #3" to make sure make uninstall didn't miss any files.

Method #2 (checkinstall -- only for debian based systems)

Overview of the process

In debian based systems (e.g. Ubuntu) you can create a .deb package very easily by using a tool named checkinstall. You then install the .deb package (this will make your debian system realize that the all parts of your package have been indeed installed) and finally uninstall it to let your package manager properly cleanup your system.

Step by step

sudo apt-get -y install checkinstall
cd $SOURCE_DIR 
sudo checkinstall

At this point checkinstall will prompt for a package name. Enter something a bit descriptive and note it because you'll use it in a minute. It will also prompt for a few more data that you can ignore. If it complains about the version not been acceptable just enter something reasonable like 1.0. When it completes you can install and finally uninstall:

sudo dpkg -i $PACKAGE_NAME_YOU_ENTERED 
sudo dpkg -r $PACKAGE_NAME_YOU_ENTERED

Method #3 (install_manifest.txt)

If a file install_manifest.txt exists in your source dir it should contain the filenames of every single file that the installation created.

So first check the list of files and their mod-time:

cd $SOURCE_DIR 
sudo xargs -I{} stat -c "%z %n" "{}" < install_manifest.txt

You should get zero errors and the mod-times of the listed files should be on or after the installation time. If all is OK you can delete them in one go:

cd $SOURCE_DIR 
mkdir deleted-by-uninstall
sudo xargs -I{} mv -t deleted-by-uninstall "{}" < install_manifest.txt

User Merlyn Morgan-Graham however has a serious notice regarding this method that you should keep in mind (copied here verbatim): "Watch out for files that might also have been installed by other packages. Simply deleting these files [...] could break the other packages.". That's the reason that we've created the deleted-by-uninstall dir and moved files there instead of deleting them.

---

99% of this post existed in other answers. I just collected everything useful in a (hopefully) easy to follow how-to and tried to give extra attention to important details (like quoting xarg arguments and keeping backups of deleted files).