Indeed I do/did not really understand the effects of "make clean" and "make distclean", Richard (this _is_ a newbie list, isn't it?). Your explanation helps a bit, thanks.
Thus "make distclean" would do the job like "uninstall", if I understand that right. And it depends on the individual programs/source-packages which one would work, right ? Now, on this other aspect of weeding out things that had been installed not by (what I would remember as "admin" or rather, root user) some specific intention or attention with installing/compiling one specific source "tar(gz)"-pack; but rather of what has been placed there when a "distroŽ" more or less automatically had installed say, "groups" of packages, e.g. "text tools". Sure the package manager of _that_ distro ould be of help for uninstalling too. That works simply enopugh with some "evident" packages - e.g., if you use one mailer and like it, it's evident that other mailer-packages could go. That hoever, is different with the (sometimes quite large) "libxxxx" packages, or some rather "inevident" named things. Not being a programmer, nor a systems professional, it is not at all evident, from the (sometimes arcane) short desciptions those package managing tools offer, to conclude to the package's meaning and usefulness or even necessity. "ldd" there, could give a hint - though, oh! sure!, only if all those "ldd" outputs then are cross-checked. Which is what I meant with "a hassle", doing exactly that, manually.<bg> But couldn't there be some kind of "sorting" prog/algorythm (please take "sorting" as quite large a term) which could do just that ? There should be, or at least it's thinkable to be do-able, a "listing" of "non-shared", so to say "singular" files (or even packages), at which you could then look at more in detail in order to decide if to delete them or not. // Heimo Claasen // <hammer at revobild dot net> // Brussels 2002-09-20 The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.revobild.net - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
