I'm trying to uninstall the current version of Eclipse IDE in my RHEL machine by simply deleting all the files like:
sudo rm -rf ~/.eclipse
sudo rm -rf ~/eclipse-workspace
I also tried
sudo yum remove 'eclipse*'
However, these didn't seem to solve the purpose.
Any help will be appreciated, thanks!
Applications on Linux systems are most often installed using so-called packages, which are managed by a package management system. In the case of RHEL, packages use the RPM format, and the package manager of choice is a tool called yum.
Both installation and removal of software (packages) should be done using yum, so as to allow the package management system keep track of all installed files and current status. Therefore, you shouldn't try to remove software by simply deleting files from the file system. Instead, use the yum command. See the RHEL System Admin Guide for a detailed explanation of how to use yum to search, install, upgrade, and remove packages: Working with Packages.
You have tried the correct command (yum remove <package-name>), but you need to use the correct package name. On RHEL 7.4, the latest version of Eclipse is available as a part of the DevTools channel, and the package name is rh-eclipse47 (see Enabling the Red Hat Developer Tools Repositories). Note that you may have also installed an older version, which would be, for example, rh-eclipse46.
To find out what is the name of the package you have installed, you can run, for example, the following command:
yum list installed | grep eclipse
There is also the possibility that you installed the software not from an RPM package but manually, e.g. from a .tar.gz file distrubuted from eclipse.org. If that's the case, you will need to use the uninstaller program supplied with that distribution of the software.