When I ever did a uninstallation in Windows there were always few residue files like the registry entries and what not.
I recently uninstalled Wine from cmd line; zypper remove wine —>114mb was freed.
How can i make sure that there are NO STRAY FILES remaining as a result from this removal?
Here you go
FAQ - The Official Wine Wiki
Here comes the “old” one: Linux is not Windows.
If you do not run any program on wine, wine does nothing. Thinking in terms of “stray files” is a windows-thought. You could simply leave wine installed, keep ~/.wine where it is, it will not do anything unless you start using it. Removing and readding packages is (understatement) not really the linux way to deal with issues.
A
zypper remove wine
does what it should do, it removes the files that were installed by installing the wine package. But, wine -at time of installing- may have pulled in a lot of dependencies. You cannot simply remove these, since programs you installed after wine was installed may need them.
Wine messes with a lot of other folders other than ~/.wine like ~/.local/… and ~/.config according to
FAQ - The Official Wine Wiki
I think the op was referring to these as stray files 
@brucewayne507 - while UN-installing using zypper did you use “-u” param ?
*-u, --clean-deps*
Automatically remove dependencies which become unneeded after
removal of requested packages.
On 04/22/2013 07:56 AM, brucewayne507 wrote:
> How can i make sure that there are NO STRAY FILES remaining as a result
> from this removal?
i could just tell you the answer, but insead i elect to teach you
where to find the answer, and then tell:
in a terminal the command “man zypper” results in a long long output
of “the manual” for zypper…
if you are using KDE (you should say what you use when you ask a
question) you can click open Konqueror, and type into the URL block
#zypper
and thereby see the same manual in a more
pleasing format, and one you can click links to other commands
or, you can hold down the left Alt and momentarily press the F2, then
type
#zypper
and press enter and the manual will be
shown in your designated default browser
in any of those manuals you will find the command line switch “-u” or
“–clean-deps” which will “Automatically remove dependencies which
become unneeded after removal of requested packages.”
so instead of using the first line below (as you did) use any of the
others (they will all give the same result):
zypper remove wine
zypper remove --clean-deps wine
zypper rm --clean-deps wine
zypper remove -u wine
zypper rm -u wine
i usually pick the one with the least typing!! 
or if you prefer GUI tools: open YaST, click on Software
Management, search on WINE (or Wine, or wine, or winE, etc) right
click and select “Delete” then near the window’s top, click on
“Options” and select “Cleanup when deleting packages”, then click
“Accept”
in any of those cases you may be warned that removing stuff will
cause problems…and, it sure might…so, don’t just remove stuff
when you are not CERTAIN it is ok to do so…
Knurpht mentioned that and he IS correct…this is NOT Windows so
just leave it, it won’t hurt anything and you might decide you do
need it, next week…
Thanks for the link
What I meant was a general reason to eliminate the remaining files after uninstallation. Wine was just an example
Thanks a lot for the above tutorial that you taught me. Worth it!!
This is what i was looking for!!
removing unneeded dependencies after uninstallation.Thanks a lot…
Conclusions:
1.Learnt about the differences after uninstallation in Linux and Windows
2.Shall be using the -u option while uninstalling;making sure there arent any unused dependencies that wont be needed in future
3.Shall be implementing the use of tutorial that DenverD gave and will try to explore new ones .Very helpful!!
you are welcome
> Thanks a lot
welcome.
lots of learning to do during this transition…
–
dd
Generally, you can get rid of the settings file or settings folder for various applications present in your “home” folder
Usually these files/folders are of the same name as the application and are suffixed by a dot (.)
They are also “hidden” ,so you need to un-hide and delete them.
On 2013-04-22 16:16, brucewayne507 wrote:
> This is what i was looking for!!
> removing unneeded dependencies after uninstallation.Thanks a lot…
However, that will not delete “unneeded” files remaining from the
previous wine install, like for example, the entire ~/.wine/ directory
on your home.
Configuration and data files created by any Linux application are not
removed when you uninstall the rpm, and that’s intentional. They just
use disk space, so it is up to you to locate and remove them if you so wish.
And if you reinstall the application at a later time, it may reuse those
files.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)