How to uninstall or deactivate a LIGOtools package

Peter Shawhan
February 10, 2004

There are a few situations in which you may wish to remove some or all versions of a LIGOtools package:

You may want/need to remove old versions of a package to recover the disk space.
You may want to remove all versions of a package because you do not ever plan to use that package.
You may want to remove all versions of a package because it conflicts with your own personal copy of the same software (e.g. fftw, lal, lalapps).

Actually, there are two ways to "remove" a LIGOtools package, and it is important to understand the distinction between them:

You can uninstall a specific version of a package, deleting it from disk and freeing up the disk space that it used. The syntax for this is:
ligotools_uninstall <package> <version>
For example:
ligotools_uninstall lal 2.0
If you want to uninstall multiple versions of a package, you have to execute ligotools_uninstall once for each version.
Alternatively, you can deactivate a package, which removes its components from the directories $LIGOTOOLS/bin, $LIGOTOOLS/lib, etc., but does not delete it from the disk. The syntax for this is:
ligotools_deactivate <package>
For example:
ligotools_deactivate lal
Note that it is generally safe to do this even if the software is currently in use, because it is only the symbolic links in $LIGOTOOLS/bin, etc., which are deleted. (When you use ligotools_update to install a new version of a package, the current version of the package is deactivated, not uninstalled.) Later on, you can use the package again by doing
ligotools_activate <package> <version>
You should type 'rehash' after doing this, if your shell is csh or tcsh.

You can only use the administration utilities ligotools_uninstall, ligotools_deactivate, etc. if you have write access to the $LIGOTOOLS directory. For more information, see the web page for the ltadmin package and the "LIGOtools Administration Guide" link in the Documentation section of that web page.