10-13-2003, 04:54 PM

Does anyone know any other ways how to unistall programs in macOSX instead of moving them to thrash?

10-13-2003, 06:22 PM

Originally Posted by sexton

Does anyone know any other ways how to unistall programs in macOSX instead of moving them to thrash?

in a terminal
cd /Applications/
rm -rf program-name

thats the quick and easy way to do it.....

10-15-2003, 07:25 AM

can you give me a more detailed explanation because I'm quite new with mac OSX

10-15-2003, 07:43 AM

for that i would have to recommend picking up a book on the Unix operating system. in short.
the "cd" and "rm" are commands that you type into a terminal window. (in OSX, its found in Applications -> Utilities)

the command "cd /Applications" brings you to your applications folder in the terminal window.

from there you can view a list of Applications contents by typing "ls -la". this will give you a listing of what's there.

finally the command "rm -rf program_name" removes any mac application who's name matches the program_name that you typed in.

poof, gone, no recycle bin, or second chance. for as though as this is, make sure you spell EVERYTHING correct. if you accidently put in the wrong program name and its removed. you will have to reinstall it.

and thus is a very brief introduction to Unix, the underside of OSX. very powerful, the command line is, yes. at first it will be esayer to drag/drop programs to remove them, but if you take the patch of the command line and learn learn learn, it can actually be easier. :cool:

hope this helps out a little at least

p.s. if you want to find out more of what those commands do, in the terminal window type "man cd" or "man rm" this will tell you a little more about the commands and tell you what some of the options/flags do and how to use them.

02-18-2004, 11:15 AM

Moving an application to the trash isn't necessarily an uninstall. There can be additional files that were placed on your system during the install. Unless you know all of the files that were installed, then you won't be able to do a complete uninstall. There are applications that come with uninstallers. These are somewhat better, but I have seen uninstallers delete files that were also used by other applications.

As for me, I would rather drag and drop (or better yet command + delete) to put something in the trash and then empty the trash when I want. Ease of use (no more line commands!) is why I bought a Mac in 1985 to begin with.

02-18-2004, 12:30 PM

For deleting single items, there isn't much point to the CLI vs GUI argument. They're both about the same efficiency, so it's not worth getting worked up about it. However, the CLI will shine when you have to perform similar actions on a large amount of data or files. That's because the CLI isn't just about doing one command at a time. Most Unix shells are fully programmable environments where you have access to constructs such as loops and conditional statements just like you'd expect from any other programming language.

For Example:

Suppose you went to http://falcoon.hp.infoseek.co.jp/diary31.htm and were impressed by the artwork so much that you wanted to download the images to your computer so that you could view them offline. As of 2004-02-18, the URL for the top image is http://falcoon.hp.infoseek.co.jp/images/top1112.jpg and the URL for the bottom image is http://falcoon.hp.infoseek.co.jp/images/top1105.jpg . And I'm sure you could guess what all the images in between are named. Now, let's download them in one fell swoop.

But before we begin, let's get our shells straight. OS X provides 3 different shells -- tcsh (the default), bash, and zsh. First, I'm going to show you an example in tcsh since that's what most of you are probably using. Then I'm going to show you an example in zsh, because it has a nice feature that makes this problem easier to solve.

Here's the tcsh example:

foreach i (1105 1106 1107 1108 1109 1110 1111 1112)
    curl -O http://falcoon.hp.infoseek.co.jp/images/top${i}.jpg
end

I chose to type out the list of numbers, because it wasn't that long. However, if I had a few hundred images to download, I would have generated the list of numbers programmatically.

Zsh has a built-in notation {x..y} for generating numeric lists which is one of the many reasons I prefer it over other shells. For example:

zsh
for i in {1105..1112} ; do
    curl -O http://falcoon.hp.infoseek.co.jp/images/top${i}.jpg
done
exit

(The exit at the end was so you could get out of zsh and back into the original shell that you started with.)

The purpose of these examples was to demonstrate a certain class of operations where a programmable shell environment really shines. I hope you all find this instructive, and I kinda look forward to showing you all more techniques in the future.