If your purpose for removing Nmap is
simply to upgrade to the latest version, you can usually use the
upgrade option provided by most binary package managers. Similarly,
installing the latest source code (as described in the section called “Unix Compilation and Installation from Source Code”) generally overwrites any
previous from-source installations. Removing Nmap is a good idea if
you are changing install methods (such as from source to RPM or vice
versa) or if you are not using Nmap anymore and you care about the few
megabytes of disk space it consumes.
How to remove Nmap depends on how
you installed it initially (see previous sections). Ease of removal (and other maintenance) is a major advantage of most binary packages. For example, when Nmap is installed using
the RPM system common on Linux distributions, it can be removed by
running the command rpm -e
nmap
zenmap as root. Analogous options are offered by
most other package managers—consult their documentation for further
information.
If you installed Nmap from source
code, removal is slightly more difficult. If you still have the build
directory available (where you initially ran make
install, you can remove Nmap by
running make uninstall. If you no longer have that
build directory, type nmap -V
to
obtain the Nmap version number. Then
download that source tarball for that version of
Nmap from http://download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/
Uncompress the tarball and change into the newly created directory
(nmap-version
). Run
./configure, including any install-path options that you specified
the first time (such as --prefix
or
--datadir
). Then run make
uninstall. Alternatively, you can simply delete all the
Nmap-related files. If you used a default source install of Nmap
versions 4.50 or higher, the following commands remove it.
# cd /usr/local
# rm -f bin/nmap bin/nmapfe bin/xnmap
# rm -f man/man1/nmap.1 man/man1/zenmap.1
# rm -rf share/nmap
# ./bin/uninstall_zenmap
You may have to adjust the above commands slightly if you
specified --prefix
or other install-path option when
first installing Nmap. The files relating to zenmap, nmapfe, and xnmap do not exist if you did not install the Zenmap frontend initially. The Python directory may also be in a different place depending on your Python version and configuration.