How do I cleanly remove ruby 1.8.7 from CentOS 5?

Solution 1:

You shouldn't install software this way.
Removing software which was installed like this may be dangerous:

1. unpack the same ruby to /tmp
2. run:

    ./configure --prefix=/tmp/somedir    # by default prefix points to /usr/local
    make
    make install    # this will install ruby in /tmp/somedir instead of where you've installed it
    cd /tmp/somedir
    find . -type f -exec rm -i /usr/local{} \;    # Use without -i if you are shure
    find . -type d -exec rm -ir /usr/local{} \;

I hope this will help you

Solution 2:

You could also try the technique from this question. Basically look for .installed.list in the directory you built ruby in. This should have a list of all the files installed. One way to remove them all would be

cat .installed.list | xargs rm

Note that this will only delete files, not directories. I guess you could also do

cat .installed.list | xargs rmdir

after the first command. That should clean up the directories aswell. And rmdir will not remove a directory if it still contains files, so it should be safe ...

Solution 3:

This works for me.

more .installed.list | xargs rm -rfv