Uninstall remove a Homebrew package including all its dependencies

Question

I have a Homebrew formula that I wish to uninstall remove along with all its dependencies  skipping packages whom other packages depend upon  a k a  Cascading package removal in Package manager parlance    e g  Uninstall package a which depends on packages b  amp  c  where package d also depends on package c  The result should uninstall both a  amp  b  skipping c   How can I do that   There must be a way to uninstall a package without leaving unnecessary junk behind

User · Answer

Using this answer requires that you create and maintain a file that contains the package names you want installed on your system. If you don't have one already, use the following command and delete the package names what you don't want to keep installed.

brew leaves > brew_packages

Then you can remove all installed, but unwanted packages and any unnecessary dependencies by running the following command

brew_clean brew_packages

brew_clean is available here: https://gist.github.com/cskeeters/10ff1295bca93808213d

This script gets all of the packages you specified in brew_packages and all of their dependancies and compares them against the output of brew list and finally removes the unwanted packages after verifying this list with the user.

At this point if you want to remove package a, you simply remove it from the brew_packages file then re-run brew_clean brew_packages. It will remove b, but not c.

User · Answer

brew rmtree doesn t work at all  From the links on that issue I found rmrec which actually does work  God knows why brew doesn t have this as a native command   brew tap ggpeti rmrec brew rmrec pkgname

User · Answer

Other answers didn t work for me  but this did  in fish shell    brew remove  lt package gt  for p in  brew deps  lt package gt       brew remove  p end   Because brew remove  p fails when some other package depends on p

User · Answer

A More-Complete Bourne Shell Function  There are a number of good answers already  but some are out of date and none of them are entirely complete  In particular  most of them will remove dependencies but still leave it up to you to remove the originally-targeted formula afterwards  The posted one-liners can also be tedious to work with if you want to uninstall more than one formula at a time   Here is a Bourne-compatible shell function  without any known Bashisms  that takes a list of formulae  removes each one s dependencies  removes all copies of the formula itself  and then reinstalls any missing dependencies   unbrew          local formula     for formula in       do         brew deps   formula            xargs brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies --force         brew uninstall --force   formula      done     brew missing   cut -f2 -d    sort -u   xargs brew install     It was tested on Homebrew 1 7 4   Caveats  This works on all standard formulae that I tested  It does not presently handle casks  but neither will it complain loudly if you attempt to unbrew a cask with the same name as a standard formula  e g  MacVim

User · Answer

You can just use a UNIX pipe for this  brew deps  FORMULA    xargs brew rm

User · Answer

Based on  jfmercer answer  corrections needed more than a comment    Remove package s dependencies  does not remove package    brew deps  FORMULA    xargs brew remove --ignore-dependencies   Remove package   brew remove  FORMULA    Reinstall missing libraries   brew missing   cut -d  -f2   sort   uniq   xargs brew install   Tested uninstalling meld after discovering MeldMerge releases

User · Answer

Save the following script as brew-purge     bin bash   Usage  brew purge formula       Removes the package and all dependancies          PKG   1  if   -z   PKG    then    brew purge --help    exit 1 fi brew rm  PKG      -ne 0    amp  amp  exit 1 while brew rm   join  lt  brew leaves   lt  brew deps  PKG   2 gt  dev null   do   done echo Package  PKG and its dependancies have been removed  exit 0   Now install it with the following command  sudo install brew-purge  usr local bin   Now run it  brew purge package   Example using gpg    brew purge gpg Uninstalling  usr local Cellar gnupg 2 2 13     134 files  11 0MB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar adns 1 5 1     14 files  597 5KB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar gnutls 3 6 6     1 200 files  8 9MB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar libgcrypt 1 8 4     21 files  2 6MB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar libksba 1 3 5     14 files  344 2KB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar libusb 1 0 22     29 files  508KB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar npth 1 6     11 files  71 7KB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar pinentry 1 1 0 1     12 files  263 9KB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar libassuan 2 5 3     16 files  444 2KB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar libtasn1 4 13     59 files  436KB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar libunistring 0 9 10     54 files  4 4MB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar nettle 3 4 1     85 files  2MB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar p11-kit 0 23 15     63 files  2 9MB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar gmp 6 1 2 2     18 files  3 1MB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar libffi 3 2 1     16 files  296 8KB  Uninstalling  usr local Cellar libgpg-error 1 35     27 files  854 8KB  Package gpg and its dependancies have been removed

User · Answer

EDIT   It looks like the issue is now solved using an external command called brew rmdeps or brew rmtree   To install and use  issue the following commands     brew tap beeftornado rmtree   brew rmtree  lt package gt    See the above link for more information and discussion     Original answer   It appears that currently  there s no easy way to accomplish this   However  I filed an issue on Homebrew s GitHub page  and somebody suggested a temporary solution until they add an exclusive command to solve this   There s an external command called brew leaves which prints all packages that are not dependencies of other packages   If you do a logical and on the output of brew leaves and brew deps  lt package gt   you might just get a list of the orphaned dependency packages  which you can uninstall manually afterwards  Combine this with xargs and you ll get what you need  I guess  untested  don t count on this      EDIT  Somebody just suggested a very similar solution  using join instead of xargs   brew rm FORMULA brew rm   join  lt  brew leaves   lt  brew deps FORMULA       See the comment on the issue mentioned above for more info

User · Answer

The goal here is to remove the given package and its dependencies without breaking another package s dependencies  I use this command   brew deps  FORMULA    xargs brew remove --ignore-dependencies  amp  amp  brew missing   xargs brew install   Note  Edited to reflect  alphadogg s helpful comment

User · Answer

The answer of  jfmercer must be modified slightly to work with current brew  because the output of brew missing has changed   brew deps  FORMULA    xargs brew remove --ignore-dependencies  amp  amp  brew missing   cut -f1 -d    xargs brew install

[macos] Uninstall / remove a Homebrew package including all its dependencies

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