LinuxDevCenter: Cooking with Linux, Part 1

“You need to know what files are installed on your system when
you install a program from source code, so that you can find and
remove all of them if you decide you don’t want them anymore. Some
program authors thoughtfully include a ‘make uninstall’ target to
perform a clean uninstall, but many do not.

“You can use standard Linux utilities to generate a
pre-installation list of all files on your system. Then generate a
post-installation list, and diff the two lists to make a list of
newly-installed files.

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