Uninstalling software

So I haven't given this much thought, but not knowing how to uninstall software seems a little strange.

Lets say I compiled/installed some software. How would I uninstall it. I know in debian or suse you can use dselect or yast2 but what if I'm not either of those or I compiled the software manually?

Thanks,
Cody

Whoops I slipped this one!
Most programs that you compile from source, will use GNU Make utility to ease the compilation procedure, accompanied by either a predefined Makefile or a configure script for Autoconf that generates the Makefile.
In some cases, developers include an unistalling action that can be used i.e. by executing "make uninstall" at the directory where the Makefile lies. Otherwise, you have to create a shell script based on the output of "make install" that will track the changes and undo them.

For this circumstance, there is a prety good system that automates the whole procedure, Checkinstall . After you configure and compile the application, Checkinstall creates a package for your distribution, which of course you can add/remove/update or anything else the package manager allows!

pretty neat, isn't it?

Most distributions have a package management system now, so if you've installed a package, you can probably remove it through the package manager.

For example, Yast on SuSE or apt on Debian.

Cheers,