How to uninstall Ruby from usr local

Question

Everything was working fine   until we decided to upgrade ruby to 1 8 7 from 1 8 6  and thats when all hell broke loose  When we compiled Ruby 1 8 7 from source it got installed into  usr local bin and Ruby 1 8 6 stayed in  usr bin   Currently  we ve uninstalled ruby 1 8 6 and by some stroke we deleted the ruby 1 8 7 files from  usr local   when we try  which ruby  it points to  usr local  If anybody could help us out what we need to do get back on track   we would be very grateful and also any idea how we can uninstall ruby from  usr local   we tried yum remove ruby   which removed ruby from  usr bin Thanks and Cheers

User · Answer

Create a symlink at  usr bin named  ruby  and point it to the latest installed ruby   You can use something like ln -s  usr bin ruby  to the installed ruby binary  Hope this helps

User · Answer

It s not a good idea to uninstall 1 8 6 if it s in  usr bin  That is owned by the OS and is expected to be there    If you put  usr local bin in your PATH before  usr bin then things you have installed in  usr local bin will be found before any with the same name in  usr bin  effectively overwriting or updating them  without actually doing so  You can still reach them by explicitly using  usr bin in your    interpreter invocation line at the top of your code    Anurag recommended using RVM  which I ll second  I use it to manage 1 8 7 and 1 9 1 in addition to the OS s 1 8 6

User · Answer

If ruby was installed in the following way     configure --prefix  usr local make sudo make install   You can uninstall it in the following way   Check installed ruby version  lets assume 2 1 2  wget http   cache ruby-lang org pub ruby 2 1 ruby-2 1 2 tar bz2 bunzip     tar xfv     cd ruby-2 1 2   configure --prefix  usr local make sudo checkinstall     will build deb or rpm package and try to install it   After installation  you can now remove the package and it will remove the directories files etc   sudo rpm -e ruby   or dpkg -P ruby  for Debian-like systems    There might be some artifacts left   Removing ruby       warning  while removing ruby  directory   usr local lib ruby gems 2 1 0 gems  not empty so not removed          Remove them manually

User · Answer

Edit  As suggested in comments  This solution is for Linux OS  That too if you have installed ruby manually from package-manager    If you want to have multiple ruby versions  better to have RVM  In that case you don t need to remove ruby older version   Still if want to remove then follow the steps below   First you should find where Ruby is   whereis ruby   will list all the places where it exists on your system  then you can remove all them explicitly  Or you can use something like this    rm -rf  usr local lib ruby rm -rf  usr lib ruby rm -f  usr local bin ruby rm -f  usr bin ruby rm -f  usr local bin irb rm -f  usr bin irb rm -f  usr local bin gem rm -f  usr bin gem

User · Answer

sudo make uninstall did the trick for me using the Ruby 2 4 tar from the official downloads page

User · Answer

do this way    sudo apt purge ruby

[ruby] How to uninstall Ruby from /usr/local?

Examples related to ruby

Examples related to installation

Examples related to uninstallation