[Wine] uninstalling something that didn't work

[Martin Gregorie]

On Tue, 2014-04-01 at 19:50 -0400, Doug wrote:
> As a matter of interest, I cannot seem to get into any of the c: or d: 
> (etc.) directories from a  terminal, but I can find them in Konqueror 
> and the unwanted programs in them that I can find I can delete via this GUI.
>
I don't use KDE or Konqueror, so won't comment about that.

> Before I clutter up the system with something else that may not work, 
> I'd like to know how to clean out those things that don't!
> 
Are you using separate Wine prefixes for each program or set of related
programs? if so, you'll be setting the $WINEPREFIX variable before
running Wine and you can completely wipe any installed Windows app by
deleting the directory named by $WINEPREFIX: the command 

"rm -rf $WINEPREFIX"

but be aware that if you're just using the default prefix (so all apps
are installed in the same Wine instance, that command will wipe *all*
installed apps. The default prefix is called '.wine'

I never use the default prefix. I always create a separate prefix for
each app or group of related programs and always launch Wine apps with a
small shell script. In the following example the script, which has four
lines, is called myapp and runs a Windows app called MyApp, whose
installer put it in C:\Program Files\MyApp within a wine prefix
called .wine_myapp:

#!/bin/bash
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine_myapp
cd $WINEPREFIX/Program Files/MyApp
wine myapp.exe

After you've written the script it should be made executable:

chmod u+x myapp

and then to command "myapp" should run the Windows app. You can run it
from the command line (useful for debugging) make a KDE launcher to run
it.

The advantage if this is both that you can easily get rid of an app or
Windows program you no longer want and that some apps may need DLLs or
Windows versions that prevent other apps from running if they are all in
the same prefix. If they are in separate prefixes they can't interfere
with each other.

HTH

Martin