Uninstalling application built from source [duplicate]

Usually you can just use:

make uninstall

or

sudo make uninstall

if the app was installed as root.

But this will work only if the developer of the package has taken care of making a good uninstall rule.

You can also try to get a look at the steps used to install the software by running:

make -n install

And then try to reverse those steps manually.

In the future to avoid that kind of problems try to use checkinstall instead of make install whenever possible (AFAIK always unless you want to keep both the compiled and a packaged version at the same time). It will create and install a deb file that you can then uninstall using your favorite package manager.

make clean usually cleans the building directories, it doesn't uninstall the package. It's used when you want to be sure that the whole thing is compiled, not just the changed files.

I do not think this is a bug, it would be a good idea to read about and learn to use checkinstall when installing from source.

you can install checkinstall from the repositories, a short description of the package;

CheckInstall keeps track of all the files created or modified by your installation script ("make install" "make install_modules", "setup", etc), builds a standard binary package and installs it in your system giving you the ability to uninstall it with your distribution's standard package management utilities.

These links below may be helpful to get a better understanding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CheckInstall

http://checkinstall.izto.org/