# How Remove Paraview 5.9.1 tar contents, ubuntu 20.04
**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/how-remove-paraview-5-9-1-tar-contents-ubuntu-20-04/7961
**Category:** ParaView Support
**Created:** [September 9, 2021, 12:08am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/how-remove-paraview-5-9-1-tar-contents-ubuntu-20-04/7961 "2021-09-09T00:08:32Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@JuliusNepos](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/JuliusNepos)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2021, 12:08am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/how-remove-paraview-5-9-1-tar-contents-ubuntu-20-04/7961/1 "2021-09-09T00:08:32Z")
I used a tar -xvf ParaView-5.9.1-MPI-Linux-Python3.8-64bit.tar.gz to attempt to install Paraview 5.9.1 onto my Ubuntu 20.04 system. The tar file is 494.5 MB.
Unfortunately I unpacked 168 pages of file names all over my system; including demos and /cinema/view/2.0/images and /pytz/zoneinfo/Navajo. There are 970,000 characters in the unpack list, I cannot go thru and manually delete 1 million files.
Of course Paraview itself won’t work and I believe I should build the app from source rather than try to use a pre-compiled binary.
Thus the question is: how do I get rid of the tar files and remove all the extra stuff it blew all over my OS? I saved the program output to a doc file but it is 168 pages long. Thus deleting files manually is impossible.
General instructions seem to be:
Next compile and install the software (use configure & make to compile it):
Finally compare both lists using the diff utility to find out what files are placed where. This list can be used to uninstall all files installed using source tar ball.
diff packagelist.b4 packagelist.after \> package.uninstall.list
Say, if you wish to uninstall files then you need to get list of files from package.uninstall.list file. Use the following small for loop at shell prompt to remove all files:
for i in $(grep “\>” package.uninstall.list | awk ‘{ print $2 }’)
do
/bin/rm -fi “$i”
done
It’s a bit confusing. I want to remove the contents of a tarball but the instructions say to compile it. There is no compilation and any source code will be different.
I did manually save the install log, which is the 168 page document. Somewhere in there is perhaps a file which lists everything untarred. How do I find and use it?
  
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### Author:  [@wascott](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/wascott)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2021, 12:16am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/how-remove-paraview-5-9-1-tar-contents-ubuntu-20-04/7961/2 "2021-09-09T00:16:58Z")
John,
I don’t have solutions here, but a quick thought is that ParaView would not drop files all over your system. They would be in very specific directory trees. What I would do is create a directory called “sandbox”, and untar ParaView into sandbox. Now, you can see what the ParaView install looks like, and can do some cautious deleting. Further, I think you will want to use rm -rf directory-name VERY, VERY CAUTIOUSLY.
Alan
Alan
---
### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2021, 4:25pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/how-remove-paraview-5-9-1-tar-contents-ubuntu-20-04/7961/3 "2021-09-09T16:25:17Z")
> [@JuliusNepos](#):
>
> Unfortunately I unpacked 168 pages of file names all over my system; including demos and /cinema/view/2.0/images and /pytz/zoneinfo/Navajo. There are 970,000 characters in the unpack list, I cannot go thru and manually delete 1 million files.
How, exactly, did you unpack ParaView ?
Edit: This is a mess,
`/cinema/view/2.0/images` is supposed to be in `install/lib/python3.8/site-packages/paraview/tpl/cinemasci/viewers/cinema/view/2.0/images`
while `/pytz/zoneinfo/Navajo` is supposed to be in `install/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pytz/zoneinfo/Navajo`
Unless you can answer my first question very precisely, I do not see how this can be fixed automatically.