On Thu, 4 Aug 2005, Matt Hyclak wrote:

On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 02:28:08AM +0900, Dave Gutteridge enlightened us:

...

Okay, I tried installing OpenOffice beta, and I think I messed it up, so I wanted to uninstall it.

I thought wilcards worked, so I tried: [root@localhost program]# rpm -e openoffice* error: package openoffice* is not installed

They do with yum, which cleans up the dependencies as well.

yum erase openoffice*

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE jim@rossberry.com http://www.rossberry.com "Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." Thomas Paine

On Thursday 04 August 2005 14:17, Dave Gutteridge wrote:

[root@localhost program]# ls python python-core

And they're flashing red, which I've never seen before. It's very ominous looking.

Probably symbolic links whose targets have been removed. You can remove them.

Hint: always use ls -l to determine what a file really is.

On Thursday 04 August 2005 14:28, Dave Gutteridge wrote:

But why were they flashing red? That seems very dramatic for a symbolic link.

Because, as I said, their targets have been removed.

On 8/4/05 11:17 AM, Dave Gutteridge wrote:

In the /opt/openoffice.org1.9.122/program/ directory there are still two files remaining:

[root@localhost program]# ls python python-core

And they're flashing red, which I've never seen before. It's very ominous looking.

In a stock Red Hat-esque setup, the flashing red indicates a dangling symlink. Try this:

cd /var/tmp touch zzz ln -s zzz yyy rm zzz ls

The yyy link should appear in blinking red because the file to which it points, zzz, is no longer available. You can delete dangling links without danger.

yum remove PACKAGE

But will this work when the original isntall was done with RPMs and not YUM? I attempted to install OpenOffice.org Beta via YUM, but couldn't find it in a repository. So I had to isntall it from the RPMs offered on the OpenOffice.org site. Then, when I tried to uninstall it, I tried: # yum remove openoffice* ... and: # yum remove openoffice ... but it didn't work. If I have something installed without YUM, how do I use YUM to uninstall it?

Dave

On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 12:14:49PM +0200, Peter Kjellström enlightened us:

...

...

yum remove PACKAGE

But will this work when the original isntall was done with RPMs and not YUM? I attempted to install OpenOffice.org Beta via YUM, but couldn't find it in a repository. So I had to isntall it from the RPMs offered on the OpenOffice.org site. Then, when I tried to uninstall it, I tried: # yum remove openoffice* ... and: # yum remove openoffice ... but it didn't work. If I have something installed without YUM, how do I use YUM to uninstall it?

I don't think yum should have any problems removing packages even if they were manually installed with the rpm-command. "yum remove openoffice" should work if the package was indeed called openoffice (you can find out with "rpm -qa | grep -i openoffice").

You have to be careful when using *'s. If you run the command

yum remove oppenoffice*

It *might* do what you want, however if you happen to have files in your current directory, bash (the shell) will expand that * into files. So in your case, let's say you downloaded all of the OOo beta files into your current directory, and you ran the above command. Bash would turn that into

yum remove openofficeorg-data01.foo.rpm openofficeorg-data02.foo.rpm etc.

That's obviously not what you intended. However

yum remove "openoffice*"

prevents bash from expanding the * and passes it along to yum where it belongs.

Long story short, you have to watch any sort of wildcard/special characters and be sure to quote or escape them appropriately.

Matt

On 8/5/05, Dave Gutteridge dave@tokyocomedy.com wrote:

I'm pretty sure I tried that, but there's always the chance that I messed up the syntax somehow. Next time I'll pay more attention to the steps I take to see if it's possible to remove a package using yum the way you say. I mean, I believe you, but I was pretty sure I was following the proper procedures and it didn't fly for some reason. No way to tell this time round, though.

Yeah, yum just uses the rpmlib bindings and gets access to the rpmdb so packages "manually" installed via rpm should still be available for info, list, remove etc. types of commands inside of yum. I second the recommendations given already to yum list installed | grep -i openoffice

That will give you the _exact_ name of the package so that then you are absolutely sure that you are telling yum to remove the right thing.

Regards, Greg