Removing and reinstalling remind

[Nathaniel Biser]

I agree with Tommy here, that is probably what you need to do. Also, you could try the whereis command, and see if that locates where the program is at. After it is removed, use the package manager to install. Best of Luck!

Nathaniel
On Oct 15, 2015, at 4:00 PM, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com<mailto:tommy.trussell at gmail.com>> wrote:


On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 1:22 PM, AFJ Headquarters <agents4jesus at gmail.com<mailto:agents4jesus at gmail.com>> wrote:
I recently discovered a really neat program called remind. I didn't know it was on the Ubuntu repos, so I installed it manually from their site (https://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind). I downloaded the .tar.gz and unzipped it using Unarchiver and, (via terminal) made it my working directory. In the README it told me to run wish ./build.tk<http://build.tk/>, then run make install. I did that, but it didn't run as well as it did on my friend's Ubuntu machine. Later I found out that they installed it via apt-get. Ugh. I tried running the unconfigure script that was inside the download, but I fear that it only made things worse...

Now I don't really know where it installed to, and I am unable to uninstall it. I ran sudo apt-get remove remind, sudo apt-get purge remind, but they all said that it wasn't installed so it wasn't removed.

What do I do?


First of all, congratulate yourself for having learned how to download and install this particular software WITHOUT using the package manager. It's really powerful that you can do that; it's a cool thing you can do sometimes.

HOWEVER The downside is when you ran that build.tk<http://build.tk/> file, it installed the software on your system and the package manager does not know where it is. That's why apt-get (or if you had used Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center) didn't find it. The package manager makes things really easy -- not only does it know where things are, it knows how to make sure everything works together.

NOW THE SCARY PART: ... do you TRUST the programmers who wrote that software? Can you TRUST the location you downloaded it from?  As soon as you ran that build program, it COULD have gone through your machine doing all sorts of things to your computer. If you were somewhat cautious and never gave it your system password, then it wouldn't be able to do anything worse than destroy or give others access to all of the data files you can access from your computer. If you DID give it your system password, then it could destroy or give others access to your entire system and possibly other places in your network. You didn't give it a password did you? (Actually I am sure you did, because I looked ahead and I know the script needed it to work.)

SO let's assume you CAN trust the folks who wrote that software you downloaded.

I downloaded the software myself and had a look.

The wish command is just a shell for running Tcl program files. build.tk<http://build.tk/> is a tcl program file.

Open that file and have a look inside it -- you can see the commands it ran.

Notice at the very top, it includes a setting that defines "INST_DIR" -- /usr/local/bin

It also defined MAN_DIR (online help files) -- /usr/local/man

SO those are the places where it PROBABLY installed its files. (assuming you can trust the programmers, remember?)

If you have not done a "local install" of any other software, this will be the only stuff in those two directories, and it will be really easy to delete it. Just delete everything INSIDE /usr/local/bin/ and /usr/local/man/ (do not delete the "parent" directories).

If you don't know how to delete stuff in those directories, I bet you can figure it out.

In a terminal:
  -- the delete command is called rm
  -- the command to temporarily give yourself root permission is sudo
  -- the command to learn how to use those commands is called man

so for example: type

man rm

OR once you know a command and just want a reminder

rm --help

if that last one scrolls off the screen, learn about "pipes" and the less program

rm --help | less

That last set of commands tells the rm program to display its help files and "pipe" the output to the less program so you can read it comfortably.


NOW you have great power, and with great power you have great responsibility. Use it wisely!!!






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