OS X Package Uninstaller

by Benjamin Gandon © 2015-2018

Overview

pkg-uninstall is a command line tool that helps in uninstalling OS X packages.

Several safe-guards are implemented in pkg-uninstall to ensure that the uninstallation process is somehow kept under control. But it will not prevent you from doing silly things like uninstalling core packages that are vital to your OS X system and applications.

This is inherent to OS X Packages. Thus, you are strongly advised to make a backup copy of your system prior to using pkg-uninstall. Go and setup Time Machine for that.

Usage

General usage form is:

pkg-uninstall [options] <package-id> ...

Where package identifiers are to be found in the list of installed packages, as returned by pkgutil --pkgs.

So you should first make a backup copy of your system. Then, you should dry run pkg-uninstall with standard user privileges and the --dry-run option:

pkg-uninstall --dry-run <package-id>

With this, you'll see what would happen, without actually changing anything to the system.

Once you're really sure of what you're doing, you might finally run:

sudo pkg-uninstall <package-id>

Options

Several options can be specified.

• --help: display usage informationdisplay usage information.

• --version: display version number.

• --dry-run (highly recommended for a first use): Explain what would happen during the uninstallation, without actually modifying the system. When running the tool with this option, you don't need superuser privileges.

• --verbose: be verbose about directories and files that are listed as part of the installed package, but that cannot be actually found in the file system.

• --force: force uninstallation, even if some directories or some files are actually missing on the file system. This just bypasses safeguards that have the tool stop early in the process. It does not enforce any operations that are prevented by --dry-run.

• --prefix-dir: specify one single installation prefix directory for all packages to uninstall, instead of fetching their individual InstallPrefixPath values that are stored in the receipts database. Package directories and files will have this directory prepended before tring to remove them from the file system. Both --prefix-dir=<dir> and --prefix-dir <dir> syntaxes are supported.

• --infer-prefix-dir: for each package to uninstall, do not use the InstallPrefixPath value, but infer a suitable directory instead. This might take a long time to run. See below for more details.

Safeguards

• Check that all specified packages are listed as installed before proceeding. Stop with failure message if one of them is not.

• Check that the directories and files (that are listed as part of the packages) are actually present on the file system, taking any installation prefix directory into account. Report any issue about that (with details when --verbose). Advise the user to --force uninstallation to proceed any further.

Caveats

pkg-uninstall supports files and directories that include blanks like spaces and tabs. But it does not supports new line (LF) and double quotes (") charaters in filenames. If you run into such situation, then a rewrite in Perl (or any similar language) will be necessary to obtain the required robustness.

Further Documentation

What is an OS X Installer Package?

These are .pkg files that are meant to be fed into the OS X Installer application. Apple introduced this concept to standardize the installation of system packages and applications. Without really thinking of any uninstallation step, though.

Identifiers of installed packages are listed by:

pkgutil --pkgs

And the contents of a package can be inspected with:

pkgutil --files <package-id>

But keep in mind that these files could be installed anywhere on your system during the installation process.

Moreover, the receipts database, that stores information about installed OS X Installer Packages dosen't implement anything like dependency management. So, it cannot tell you: “Hey, you can't uninstall this package because that one depends on it”. As a consequence, uninstalling one of the installed packages could break anything in the system or any application.

Thus, there is no built-in OS X tool to uninstall such packages in an automated manner.

Packages are not well designed to be uninstalled, and doing it is a pain. This tool was written as an attempt to solve this problem. Just like PackageUninstaller, but as a command-line tool.

Curious about the Receipts Database?

To browse the install history, just run:

plutil -p /Library/Receipts/InstallHistory.plist | less

And if you need to inspect the receipts database further:

ls /var/db/receipts
plutil -p /var/db/receipts/<package-id>.plist
defaults read /var/db/receipts/<package-id>.plist InstallPrefixPath

Unsure about the right Installation Prefix Directory?

When specifying --infer-prefix-dir (without specifying any --prefix-dir), pkg-uninstall will infer a suitable installation prefix directory for each specified package. This is an alternative to retrieving the InstallPrefixPath values from the receipts database, where OS X stores information about installed packages.

This alternative might be useful if the package has been moved or installed in a directory that is not the one that has been declared.

The algorithm performs the following steps:

• List all package directories and locate them in the filesystem. Note that your locate database should be up-to-date for this to work reliably.
• When all the directories listed in a package can be found in one single prefix directory, use it as installation prefix directory.
• In case of multiple matches, advise the user to specify a --prefix-dir
• In case no prefix can help finding all the package files and directories, advise the user to specify a --prefix-dir

For this to work as expected, your locate database should be up-to-date. If unsure about whether it actually is, just refresh it prior to running pkg-uninstall --infer-prefix-dir:

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

You'll notice this takes some time for all your file system to get indexed.

References

• How do I uninstall any Apple pkg Package file?
• Uninstall applications installed from packages
• hewigovens/PackageUninstaller
• Uninstalling .pkg files on OSX
• The “Packages” (app) resources
• Uninstalling packages (.pkg files) on Mac OS X
• OSX Packages Uninstaller by Michal Papis
• osx-pkg-uninstall.sh from radare2

Similar Commercial Tools

• UninstallPKG

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. Few guidelines should be observed, though:

• New code should not break existing tests. Check this with bats ./test
• Code should be easy to read.
• Variable names should describe well the data they hold, in the context of what your code is doing.
• Function names should properly describe what they do, in the context of your code (so that the name doesn't get too long).
• Functions should be short and do one thing.
• Your code should include automated tests. Here we use the BATS technology.

You'll also observe different conventions in main code, compared to test code.

• Main code is developped following my own habits of portable shell code. That's why it looks a bit old fashionned, because bashisms constructs are avoided. Examples:
  • Use expr a : b >/dev/null in favor of [[ a =~ b ]]
  • Use back-ticks in favor of $( ... ) (even though it disallows nesting, which sometimes complicates things a little)
  • Use expr ... in favor of $(( ... ))
  • Avoid arrays and hashes (and thus use Perl instead)
  • ...
• Test code is BATS, so all bashisms are allowed there. Because it must be run in Bash anyway.

License

pkg-uninstall is released under the MIT License.