If your purpose for removing Nmap is simply to upgrade to the latest version, you can usually use the upgrade option provided by most binary package managers. Similarly, installing the latest source code (as described in the section called “Linux/Unix Compilation and Installation from Source Code”) generally overwrites any previous from-source installations. Removing Nmap is a good idea if you are changing install methods (such as from source to RPM or vice versa) or if you are not using Nmap anymore and you care about the few megabytes of disk space it consumes.

How to remove Nmap depends on how you installed it initially (see previous sections). Ease of removal (and other maintenance) is a major advantage of most binary packages. For example, when Nmap is installed using the RPM system common on Linux distributions, it can be removed by running the command rpm -e nmap zenmap as root. Analogous options are offered by most other package managers—consult their documentation for further information.

If you installed Nmap from the Windows installer, simply open the Control Panel, select “Add or Remove Programs” and select the “Remove” button for Nmap. You can also remove Npcap unless you need it for other applications such as Wireshark.

If you installed Nmap from source code, removal is slightly more difficult. If you still have the build directory available (where you initially ran make install), you can remove Nmap by running make uninstall. If you no longer have that build directory, type nmap -V to obtain the Nmap version number. Then download that source tarball for that version of Nmap from https://nmap.org/dist/ or https://nmap.org/dist-old/. Uncompress the tarball and change into the newly created directory (nmap-<version>). Run ./configure, including any install-path options that you specified the first time (such as --prefix or --datadir). Then run make uninstall. Alternatively, you can simply delete all the Nmap-related files. If you used a default source install of Nmap versions 4.50 or higher, the following commands remove it.

# cd /usr/local
# rm -f bin/nmap bin/nmapfe bin/xnmap
# rm -f man/man1/nmap.1 man/man1/zenmap.1
# rm -rf share/nmap
# ./bin/uninstall_zenmap

You may have to adjust the above commands slightly if you specified --prefix or other install-path option when first installing Nmap. The files relating to zenmap, nmapfe, and xnmap do not exist if you did not install the Zenmap frontend.