I talked about this before, but I can't find the post. I removed CleanMyMac today with EasyFind. There are three files left over that I can't remove. I forgot what someone said to do to take care of those stubborn files. They are not in the trash either.

Thanks.

Rita

There are several sets of instructions on the web for removing CleanMyMac, but this one seems reasonably complete.

Thanks Joe: I followed all the manual instructions before you wrote this and did again on the linked page you sent me. Nothing showed up in the Library. I didn't download the app, because I wasn't sure how safe it was. Do you know? If it is safe, then I will try it. Maybe it can get rid of the three files EasyFind can't seem to. Otherwise, I'm stumped.

Thanks.

Rita

AppCleaner might do the trick.

AppCleaner - FreeMacSoft
https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/

AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps. Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily. AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them.

Hi, Rita,

If that literally means that files you expect to be in /Library (or, as the case may be, ~/Library) don't appear to be there, it may be because they're invisible.

ShowHiddenFiles 2.0.6 or HideSwitch 1.6.0 may be helpful. (There's also a Terminal command to toggle visibility if you want to get involved.)

Files can be invisible as Artie suggests, or they can be tagged as System files which will also hide them. The easy way to find those is:

1. click ⌘F on the desktop which brings up a Finder search window.
2. enter the name of a file you are searching for in the search bar at the top of the window.
3. At the top of this window be sure "Search: This Mac" is selected,
4. then click on the + sign at the far right end of the "kind" line to bring up another condition and add "File Visibility — Visible or Invisible".
5. Click on the + again and add "System Files — Are included".
6. If you are unsure of the file name leave the filename at the top empty and add another condition "Name — matches/contains/begins with/ends with/is/is not — and a name or name fragment".

This is an often overlooked and very powerful capability of Finder that requires no third party app to do its thing.

Hi:

Thank you. I already have AppCleaner but find it leaves stuff behind, and then I go to EasyFind and get rid of the rest. This time EasyFind left 3 files. I am going to take Artie's and JoeMike's advice and look for the invisible files, etc. as my next step.

Thanks again.

Rita

I went to follow your instructions one by one. I clicked Command+F but finder didn't come up. Darn. I pulled finder up my usual way to look for the files that were still in EasyFind. There were two. I went to see if I could delete them before I put them into the search in Finder. They then were deleted just fine! I can't explain why it worked all of a sudden but I am glad to know how to find invisible files now. Thank you.

Rita

You first have to click on the desktop, then ⌘F will open the finder window. Alternatively you can open a Finder window anyway you so desire and when you enter a search term in the search bar the options will then appear in the window.

Any way I am glad you got rid of the stray files.

OK, it worked when I clicked on the desktop. Thanks. EasyFind does show invisibles and I had it checked, so not sure why it took so long to delete but all is well. Thanks again.

Rita

I can posit a number possible reasons it took so long, but they would all just be guesses. If you encounter a similar situation in the future try rebooting in "Safe Mode",...


...then try deleting the "stuck" file(s).

FWIW I used to have EasyFind and found it useful because of Spotlight's early limitations, but in the last few releases of MacOS, I find that by tweaking the options in the Finder window, I can find anything I want in milliseconds as compared to a several minute search required by EasyWord. When searching for file content the speed difference is huge. As a test, I just downloaded the latest EasyFind from the App Store and ran a few tests. To my great surprise, Finder/Spotlight found files that were apparently invisible to EasyFind with all its options turned on. 😳

Thank you. I always forget about safe mode, but I do reboot to make things work again. Thanks for helping.

Rita

JoeMike: I would like to revisit this topic. You said you tweek Finder to find files to delete them? Could you walk me through that. I have over 200 Facebook files that EasyFind won't delete. I don't even have a Facebook account. But I read where Facebook inserts files into our computers from certain webpages. It's sneaky and I want to get rid of those files.

Hi, Rita.

I've no longer got EasyFind, so I'm working from memory.

Per Devon Technologies, they deliberately made it difficult to delete items that require verification as your Facebook files apparently do.

But... You can hit command-R to get to their locations and delete them, after verification, from there. Chances are that all your Facebook files are in no more than a couple of locations and that deleting them in bulk will be easy.

1. Click on the desktop
2. Press Command+F (⌘F)
3. Enter a name of part of a name in the suspect files
4. Expand or narrow the search by click on the plus sign at the rigth side of the search window and adding additional conditions or arguments
5. Select the desired file(s) that appear in the window
6. Click on the trash can icon on the Window's tool bar
7. If prompted, enter the password for your administrative user account

Hi: I tried what you said. I tried it before you said to. LOL! When I put in Facebook into Finder, all I get is a bunch of recipes I've downloaded and NOT from Facebook. I also got random pictures (after I clicked on them) of other stuff including a page I had looked at a long time ago on eBay). I hit the plus sign and tried entering Facebook and nothing happened. I added a little bit of what I found on one entry of EasyFind that included Facebook and nothing happened. So....

So do it from EasyFind as I suggested.

*******

Hi Artie: I tried what you said and found a lot of files that included "Facebook Strings, Facebook Contact Updater, F/B plugin Bundle, F/B Video, etc., all of which could not be "modified or deleted because it's required by MacOS)!! That makes me angry. I don't really want them in my computer. I don't know if they can see my contacts or anything else but it feels invasive. Out of over 500 files, I got rid of about 300 with OnyX. It couldn't remove the rest and I guess I can't do it manually thanks to Apple.

Update: I just tried the same thing with Google and got the same "string" message. Can't get rid of about 60 Google files or strings or whatever.

***

I did. I just tried JoeMike's way first.

Sorry for jumping in, Rita; I should have waited for you to respond.

joemike's solution is a good one if you know precisely what you're looking for, but it's more or less useless in your situation, while EasyFind's results tell you.

I never mess with files in locations that begin with /System, and neither should you or anyone else who's not an EXPERT; that part of the OS is "sacred."

You've got to judge which items can be safely deleted and which you should just grit your teeth and ignore, and if you'd like a little help in that respect, just post a screenshot of EasyFind's results.

I think I can say, though, that as a general rule, anything in /System is functional rather than invasive, i.e. not to be worried about.

*****
Artie: I was going to send you a screenshot but after looking at the files, they all say "system" and/or some say "strings" which I know the MacOS won't let me get rid of. But I learned something so thanks. Glad to know it's not peeping Tom kind of stuff.

To set your mind further at ease: I ran a Find Any File search for "strings," and it found upwards of 1/4 MILLION of them, all of which - the ones I looked at, anyhow, because scrolling through the entire list would have taken all day - are associated with .lproj folders, which support languages in macOS.

You can actually delete all but the en.lproj folders (unless you need more than one language on your MBP), and there's an app that purports to do it, but it doesn't necessarily do a good job, and doing it by hand would take the rest of your life, but if you're reeeally stuck for space on your drive, running the app is a viable way to regain some (but I don't suggest it...buy a bigger drive).

A brief point.

I used Easy Find for years, then about a month ago started using Find Any File, which also free. It might be better. I haven't found any negatives yet, so interested readers might want to give Find Any File a try.

****
Thanks, Artie. It does ease my mind. I don't need more space at the moment. I just worried about intrusiveness. Even if I don't have anything to hide, it's just the idea of it. Do you think there is any danger of it removing strings that I need? Or any system files that I need? I never worried about deleting system files by an app until you mentioned it.

****

I am considering using Find any File. If you read what I said to Artie, I am just concerned that it might get rid of something it shouldn't. I don't always know what is safe to delete and what isn't, and I always trusted the apps to make the right decision. Now I'm concerned.

Find Any File may have been free, but it's $6 now on MacUpdate.

I paid $10 for Find Any File last July.

Oh, well, no big deal, because I found it to be very significantly faster - by a factor of 6 or 7 - than EasyFind in High Sierra.

I deleted EF when I got FAF and have never done a comparison in Mojave.

The only thing that "gets rid of [anything] it shouldn't" is a USER!

Neither FAF nor EF makes any decisions about what to delete or retain; all they do is tell you what's there, and whether to delete or retain is your decision, and since you've always (I think) been fastidious about "looking before you leap," I don't think either app presents any danger for you.

You are placing your trust in a leaky vessel if you leave everything up to an app. The best rules-of-thumb are:

• Don't delete anything unless you have a very recent backup or clone to recover from
• If in doubt, don't delete it (unless you get a perverse pleasure out of reinstalling apps, OSs, etc.)
• NEVER touch anything in the System Folder, a hidden folder, or anything that is owned by any user or group other than yourself.

There are Uninstaller apps that generally work pretty well and are reasonably safe to rely on, especially if the developer of the app being deleted follows all the file naming rules and guidelines — unfortunately some don't. But Uninstaller apps are no help with the kinds of files you were looking at.

I've never run across an uninstaller that gets rid of any more than the most basic files and folders related to an app.

In recent years, in particular, the OS has created so many underlying files that I doubt that anything could completely delete them other than an app that watched as they were created.

More: Years ago, I tried to follow app installations with fseventer to see precisely what was happening, but it was beyond me.

****

I noticed that. Thank you.

***
Right, but you said not to get rid of any thing "system related." I had never checked when I deleted stuff via EasyFind because I didn't know any better. But thankfully it didn't delete any system files, so maybe it's intuitive regarding that kind of thing. From now on I will always check though thanks to you.

Find all Files looks kind of complicated, so I don't think I will be using it anyway.

***

OK, thank you. You made me laugh when you said (unless you get a perverse pleasure out of reinstalling apps, OSs,

EasyFind, by developer's intent, makes it difficult to delete stuff that requires authentication, so anything you've ever deleted DIRECTLY from an EF interface has been "kosher" to delete.

I was happy with EF until I realized that it was all of a sudden taking interminably long to complete searches, so I tried FAF on a lark, found that an EF search that took more than a minute to complete took only about 10 seconds for FAF to complete, and I"ve never looked back.

Yeah, FAF is more complicated than EF, but once it's figured and configured, the speed boost is, in my estimation, well worth the effort. (I've got FAF configured to delete system files automatically, so I"ve got to be alert about what I"m doing.)

Yep. I have rendered my Mac unbootable due to deleting files I shouldn't have. But that was a long time ago. I've learned a lot since then. And I always have my hard drive cloned with Super Duper so I can restore the system.

Hard drives are so much bigger now, so the need to delete garbage files is less. I use Monolingual because it deletes some but not all foreign language files. I use AppCleaner to uninstall programs because I have to use something, and it's free. I've never seen a program on Windows or Mac that deletes all the files related to a program that should be deleted. Additional manual removal is always required. At least on the Mac, the process is more obvious. I bought Tidy Up, which is mainly for deleting duplicates, but in that program I am much more reluctant to delete files, and many of the files it finds cannot be deleted. Even some empty folders are required by the system and cannot be deleted.

With every OS, control has been taken away from the user. I've heard some of the reasons, but generally I'm against this trend.

Synium Software's CleanApp ($14.99) does that for you so you don't have to. Additionally it keeps track of what supporting files and folders are deleted by other users as a guide to your deletion. I have relied on it for several years and it hasn't steered me wrong yet.

DISCLAIMER: I receive no remuneration from Synium Software other than that of being a satisfied purchaser and user of CleanApp and several of their other apps.

Yeah, FAF is more complicated than EF, but once it's figured and configured, the speed boost is, in my estimation, well worth the effort. (I've got FAF configured to delete system files automatically, so I"ve got to be alert about what I"m doing.) [/quote]

****

I'm feeling too lazy to try to figure it out. But I am glad I know about system files now and will watch, like I said, to make sure I don't delete any.

As long as you're using EasyFind you can't delete a system file without first hitting command-R to get to it's location and then authenticating...awfully difficult to do by accident.

Unlike Find Any File, EasyFind does NOT allow you to delete a system file from its GUI.

****

I have an SSD and not a ton of memory (121 flash storage) but probably more than I need. I don't like the trend of losing control either. I used to have a lot of fun changing my icons for Safari, Finder, etc. I don't like the ones they provide. I also don't like that Apple seems to think everyone uses Facebook and has put a ton of files in the computer that I can't delete. It's just aggravating even though they are supposedly not looking at my stuff.

****

Good to know. Saves me some work!!!

Thanks for the tip on CleanApp. I bought it. At $15 it's a steal. I wish I had known about it before I sank money into Tidy Up, though Tidy Up is more of a duplicate finder and is better at that task than CleanApp.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I, of course, can't be 100% certain that Find Any File finds EVERY supporting file and folder that has been placed by an app I want to delete, but deleting what it finds with app and developer name searches is enough for me:

• My SSD has got sufficient capacity to not be compromised by 1 or 2 - even 1,000 or 2,000 - items of detritus which, if legitimately placed by apps, will in all likelihood be pretty small.
• If an app has placed something obscure, I'd like to be aware of it at installation, rather than deletion, time.
• I keep neurotically close track of additions to ~/Library/Preferences, so I'm aware of everything apps place there. (Years ago, some app or other created ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.plist to keep track of its trial period parameters, and I was on to it instantly.)
• If I ever feel that an app has placed malware, I'll wipe the volume and restore from a pre-existing clone rather than hope that some app has found all of its components.

It's kind of funny and counter-intuitive that as drive capacities have increased and security has been ramped up (to what some may say are ridiculous heights ), a heretofore unknown paranoia over (most likely minimal) detritus that may be left behind by deleted apps has grown hand in hand with them.

A front end for an fseventer like app that tells users precisely what they've just installed would, indeed, be useful for those who d/l apps from questionable sources - which I NEVER do. (I looked at fseventer out of curiosity rather than perceived need, and that was back when I should have perceived a need. )


Unfortunately, though, there's pretty much no way you can be certain that CleanApp has steered you 100% right, which, in its essence, is what it's all about.

More: Responding to freelance's question before he even asks it, my impression is that CleanApp knows what to delete but isn't geared tell you before deletion time.

Back in the PPC days, I used an app called Installer Observer. You ran it just before, then after a new install and the app told you exactly where and what had been installed.

Does CleanApp do that? Do you know of any app that does that?

Thanks.

Your impression is incorrect.

1. CleanApp shows you a list of the apps currently installed on the boot drive and optionally on other attached drives
2. when you select a Candidate for deletion it shows a proposed list of the files and folders that will be deleted along with a graph indicating the percentage of other users who have elected to delete that file along with the app.
3. you can individually choose which files and folders associated with the app you want to delete.
4. you click the Trash icon in CleanApp,
5. respond to the "Are you sure" dialogue
6. enter your administrative password if the app or some of its files are owned by System

only then is any file of folder deleted.


There is a CleanApp daemon that tracks all installations so it knows what files are placed by the installer or in the installation process. Then it uses an algorithm based on file name/extensionf, location, and a historical database of what and where other files associated with the app have been found in other installations to identify additional files created by the app at run time. It does not track or identify data files created by the app.

Actually, no, it was just imprecisely worded.

What I was trying to say is that while CleanApp follows an app's installation as part of its eventual deletion functionality, it isn't geared to show the details of the installation immediately after its occurrence, which is what freelance asked about.

To my mind, CleanApp is selling itself short badly by not giving users immediate access to the info and enabling them to see precisely what they've done immediately upon their having done it. It's a wasted, valuable opportunity to nip trouble in the bud.


For all of that, how many times has CleanApp led you to delete a file that neither an app name search nor a developer name search would have found, and how, if at all, were you able to verify that the app in question had actually created it? (I'd love to see an example.)

CleanApp doesn't list games. Too bad. I would like to uninstall a game demo.

Run your game through Find Any File; hopefully, it will find 100% of it.

To my knowledge, there is nothing to prevent you from running CleanApp immediately after an installation so you would know what files were installed, but there may be other files created by the app when it is run that CleanApp would not be able to find because they do not yet exist. While CleanApp tracks the files that are installed it does not report WHERE they are installed.


Although I have used CleanApp for several years I have never bothered to check it that closely but I do recall seeing files that were not obvious by either name or extension. I do know that I have used the "deleted by others" as a guide to choosing which files to delete when there have been multiple versions of an app or apps with similar names. No few of those files were NOT automatically flagged by CleanApp for deletion, but in the last few years I generally delete any file found even supporting files files that were found but not automatically flagged for deletion and I have yet to encounter a problem. But that is just my experience and NOT a scientific study of the subject.


If the game has an executable file and is located in /Applications, ~/Applications or a sub-directory of each it is an app and CleanApp will find and delete it. It will also find and delete Fonts, QuickTime components, screen savers, widgets, internet plugins, kernel extensions, relics, iOS backups, iOS Updates, Log files, temporary files, empty folders, identical files, old files, universal binaries, app data, and language files. AFIK it does not detect workflows or AppleScripts per. se., but those are almost always self contained and easy to delete.

CleanApp is…

• NOT a panacea
• NOT perfect
• NOT faultless
• NOT the only App delete application on the market
• NOT the only app deleting tool on my computer
• the first and IIRC only app removal tool I use
• the app removal tool I have relied on since the early days of OS X
• in my opinion the safest app removal tool for the non-technical user

FULL DISCLOSURE

I once again assert that I receive no remuneration of any kind from Synium Software other than being a satisfied purchaser and user of several of their products.

I think that knowing what I've installed, AND WHERE, before I double-click on it is more important than knowing what dregs it's left behind after I"ve uninstalled it. It doesn't even have to be specific CleanApp functionality; a free standing app that builds on its existing capabilities would be fine.

Am I alone in the perception that it would actually be useful?


This may be a rhetorical question, but can you offer any insights into how people are able to determine that files of apparently indeterminate origin are associated with a particular app?

I've d/l'ed the CleanApp demo, and I'll report back if I learn anything helpful.

CleanApp debunked...

Admittedly skeptical, I d/l'ed the CleanApp demo, OK'd all the options, and examined Excel, which, of my apps, is the one most likely to have planted files all over my SSD, and indeed, CleanApp found many items of seemingly indeterminate origin, such as these.

My immediate take was that CleanApp actually is somehow capable of finding but I quickly discovered that the paths to many of them included "Excel," so Find Any File et.al. would have found them handily. (The paths that didn't include "Excel" were Microsoft/Office related and were subject to deletion only because Excel is the only Office app I'm running.)

And I was totally put off by the deceptive presentation.

But in keeping with my mission, I hit delete, emptied the trash, and ran a FAF search for "Excel," which returned this.

As you can see, CleanApp did not completely delete Excel's associated files.

And likewise, it failed to find all the components of my other apps.

CONCLUSION: Assuming that my results are representative, which seems like a fair assumption, CleanApp DOES NOT DO THE APP REMOVAL JOB IT PURPORTS TO DO, AND IN THAT RESPECT IT'S AN UNMITIGATED FRAUD!

And the ultimate irony is that after following Synium Software's instructions for uninstalling the demo, Find Any File found this and this.

Talk about adding insult to injury!

Apparently, Synium's idea of committing suicide is jumping out of a basement window.

By the way, it should be noted that every app I've looked at in a while, i.e. I can't date this at all, let alone precisely, that's not a legacy app has got at least one component with the same /private/var/folders/gm/55g5m... path that turned up in my after-the-fact "Excel" search, so there's absolutely no reason for CleanApp to not know they exist...which it didn't with respect to every app I looked at.