uninstall procedures?

It occurred to me that the whole time I have played with Amigas, I never noticed any uninstall scripts as is popular in Windows. What is the proper procedure for completely removing all traces of a program that I have installed?

[CodyJarrett]

Uninstall scripts are really an invention of the PC, because Windows is a complete mess and leaves registry entries and files all over the place.

On the Amiga, programs tend to store their own files in one directory and if system files like library files are needed they will go in the common directories.

So, for most programs, deleting the directory is enough. You should also check that assigns are removed from the user-startup and startup-sequence files too.

Originally posted by CodyJarrett

Uninstall scripts are really an invention of the PC, because Windows is a complete mess and leaves registry entries and files all over the place.

I certainly won't dispute that!

On the Amiga, programs tend to store their own files in one directory and if system files like library files are needed they will go in the common directories.

So, for most programs, deleting the directory is enough. You should also check that assigns are removed from the user-startup and startup-sequence files too.

Sorry to pester you, but please remind me what those files might be called, and what said references might look like?

[blackcornflake]

Startup-Sequence and User-Startup are literally called just that. Both are text files that the Amiga checks on booting. Both reside in the S: directory of the SYS volume.

A typical example of an assign:

ASSIGN genetics:Games/ShootEmUps/GeneticSpecies/

This is from my User-Startup file, which is generally where assigns to specific programs should be, with Startup-Sequence containing more system-wide assigns.

To remove the assign to Genetic Species, I would load User-Startup into a text editor, and delete the relevant line. For non-permanent deactivation of the line, a semicolon inserted at the start of the line 'comments it out'.

If the program was installed with the standard installer you can tell it to make a log file of what it did during installation. Keep these in a folder and refer to them if you want to make sure you uninstall everything.

[Galahad/FLT]

I wrote a util years ago called Unigen, and this would create scripts that could be executed that would strip an installed program.

It would operate like this:

In the CLI:

Unigen Game

This would then create a file called GAME.UNI in the s directory (or whatever you called the .uni file, naming it the same as the game is obviously a good idea!).

A pop up window would appear, and you selected the Unigen Capture option once you actually started installing a program.

It would sit in the background storing all file saves to AmigaDOS.

Once the program had finished installing, you would then click on the Unigen save button and it would quit and save the script.

To remove said program, you would simply type 'Execute GAME.UNI' and it would then run through that script and delete all files listed.

If during the install process it detected that there was already a file on the hard drive with the same name (like a device file), it would skip deleting them, but leave the file name and where it was so if the user wanted to see what wasn't deleted, they only had to look in the script for the files that were commented out.

If anyone finds it, do let me know.!