Removing software installed with RPM

To remove software that was installed with RPM, you use the -e option (which stands for "erase"):
# rpm -e software-2.3.4

Note that when installing software, you have to type the name of the RPM package. But when removing software, you don't have to type the whole name of the package that contained the software. You don't have to type the .rpm extension when removing software. Probably you don't have to type the version number, either, so this would do exactly the same as the above:
# rpm -e software

This rpm -e command uses the RPM database to check where all the files related to this software were installed and then automatically removes all of those files. After removing the program files, it also removes the program from the database of installed software.

This is why it's so important you NEVER remove RPM software manually (for example, deleting single files with rm). If you just run around your system randomly deleting files that were installed with RPM, you'll get rid of the software but RPM doesn't know it and doesn't remove the software package from its database. The result is that RPM still thinks the program is installed on your system, and you may run into dependency problems later.

If you used RPM for installing a certain piece of software, use RPM for removing that piece of software, too!