Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications UninstallPKG anyone?

I was looking at MacUpdate and saw a reference to UninstallPKG. It gets many 5-star ratings at MU and looks interesting. Has anyone in this forum tried it?

I notice that it is certified for Mojave. Personally I would not use anything that has not been certified for Monterey. For example, I have two uninstall apps that will not touch anything from the App Store in either Big Sur or Monterey.

I haven't tried it but may take it for a ride. I'm Mojave and have CleanApp but the publisher (Synium) has dropped CA from their list of apps and it's no longer supported. My needs are only periodic but, when I do remove something, I like to be reasonably certain there's no flotsam and jetsam left behind.

If you haven't looked at it recently MacCleanse is reasonably priced and has had significant upgrades this year and works well. There is also an app removal tool in Marcel Bersink's TinkerTool System that is very thorough albeit a tad slow because it searches every user in the system on a file by file basis. Both are Monterey certified.

Interesting....since I'm a registered owner of TinkerTool, I thought I'd give it a shot and, to be ironic, asked it to remove CleanApp. Part way through I got this message:

"The object “CleanApp.app” from the folder “/Applications/Utilities” could not be removed. The following problem occurred: “CleanApp” couldn’t be moved to the trash because you don’t have permission to access it.

Not all selected objects could be removed successfully."

When all was said and done, the app itself remained, so I dragged it to the Trash.

Interesting, I don’t have an app to delete right now but the last time I deleted one With tinker tool system it requested a password and then deleted the application which is what I would expect. Are you sure you have the latest version?

I'm gonna be a stick in the mud and ask if you guys run Find Any File or EasyFind to see if anything's left behind after you've run an app removal tool?

I'll see your stick in the mud and raise you one: I've never run an app removal tool. I delete the app, find out how the preference files are named, then run EasyFind and/or Spotlight to find any other files to delete. Not very techie, I know, but works for me.

I simply run FAF with the name of the app and trash everything that comes up, and then I rerun it with the name of the dev and trash whatever, if anything, is left.

I very much doubt that any tool will delete an app as thoroughly as that procedure does.

I used EF and FAF after uninstalling an antivirus program. I found that both EF and FAF were necessary because each found leftovers that the other missed. I also used File > Find in Finder but that didn't work as well as the other two.

At the present state of Big Sur/Monterey, removing all the "findable" files may not be enough to remove some extensions because when installed they are "compiled" (my word for the process) into the sealed encrypted boot image. Those must be removed either by the unique uninstaller for that extension/app or via Terminal commands, the boot image then has to be rebuilt and the system rebooted.

I learned this through hard earned experience with SoftRAID. This and other issues can only be resolved when Apple completes work on the APIs that will allow extensions run in the user space instead of the system space and apparently that is not as easy as it sounds — at least without a serious performance hit.

Yes V 6.99.

That hasn’t been my practice but I did it just now with Find Any File and the result, after about 20 secs, was “205 matched”. These include things like:

.dmg
.framework
.plist
.prefpane
.pch
.xcodeproj
.h
.CleanApp.png
Launcher.app
PDFs
Core and Core Helper
Unix Executable
Logging Service
CleanAppCorePP

I haven't taken any action yet in case there's a: "Don't that...it'll be connected to something else that needs it."

The current version is 7.7 and is available here

One technique that may help is checking the last opened date (Find Any File reports that). If it has been a long time since the file was opened it is likely a relic or part of an app that you do not use and therefore unlikely to be missed.

TALK ABOUT AN OOPS!

Because of this thread I launched Koingo's MacCleanse 9 to check some facts and performance and was presented with a notification MacCleanse 10.0.1 was available for download and installation so I initiated the update. MacCleanse is a drag and drop install and everything was straight-forward until the newly downloaded app launched and promptly notified MacCleanse 10.0.1 was available for download and About MacCleanse revealedI was still running version 9. I won't bore everyone with all the iterations I went through attempting to remove all possible traces of MacCleanse 9 from system before I realized the MacCleanse 10.0.1 download package contains MacCleanse 9. I submitted a trouble report.

I am not sure who should be more embarrassed: me for not immediately recognizing the error on Koingo's part or Koingo for their error, but since Koingo's error effects a lot more people than mine I think they are the ones who should blush the most.

FOOTNOTE:

TinkerTool System asked for an administrative password and removed all trace of MacCleanse 9 according to Find Any File and EasyFind could detect.

When you ran FAF, did you hide package contents? Your results lead me to suspect that you may not have done so, and that will invariably display results for which you're not really looking because they're part of a data "subset."

Also, did you run FAF in "root mode?" <Find Any File - Support>

Not that it would necessarily have made a difference, but just to make sure that we're all on the same page, did you guys run FAF in "root mode?"

No and no.

So, does that mean I should not remove those items because they are "part of a data subset"?

The number and assortment of your 205 found items suggests to me that the contents of the entire app, which do not have to be addressed on a file by file basis, may be included, so let's try to get on the same page.

Run this search and see what your results are.

Then hit "Hide Package Contents" and see what happens. If I'm guessing correctly, your number of found items will decrease SUBSTANTIALLY, because many of them will collapse into the .dmg.

Note: Hit "option" when you hit "Find," and "Find" will change to "Find All," meaning that you're searching as root user. (You may have to authenticate.)

I did one search with Package Contents "shown", and the count went up slightly to “210 Matched” with added items, not previously found, including:

.xcscheme
CleanAppDaemon.app
com.syniumsoftware.CleanAppDaemon.plist (3 occasions)

I then changed Package Contents to “are not shown” and the result was 28 matched (186 filtered out). the .xcscheme was not in this list.

As I suspected it would, most of your laundry list collapsed into (presumably) the .dmg. The new items may have resulted from your running the search as root.

Presumably, you can trash the remaining 28 items, but you may want to post a screenshot of the list for seconding.