[texhax] Do not symlink when installing TeXLive 2008 on K/Ubuntu Intrepid or Debian systems

[R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar]

Sean Sieger wrote:
> Can you tell me what to do to remove the
> symlinks? 

I started out with a clean /usr/local/bin directory as this was a fresh 
installation on a new system. The same applied to 
/usr/local/man/man{1|5}and to /usr/local/info. Therefore, I emptied all 
four directories using the dreaded

sudo rm -f *

and set up the environment variables in ~/.bashrc.

If you have stuff in the /usr/local/{bin,man,info} trees, you might need 
to use file timestamps to filter out and remove only those symlinks put 
in by the TeXLive installation.

I would suggest using

find

to filter the wanted files using timestamp, name, or some other 
criterion, and then deleting those files. For example,

find . -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \;

will delete all files that have a timestamp older than 24 h from now.

You could use

find . -mtime +1

to check that the filtered files are indeed those you wish to delete and 
then use rm -f to do it non-interactively.

Above all, please double check before invoking rm :-)

HTH.

Chandra