Uninstall brew package and dependencies

Uninstall_brew_package_and_dependencies.md

Uninstall brew package and dependencies

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

As far as I understand it yes, that is why the last step reinstalls missing libraries.

Note that if you installed python with homebrew for your day-to-day use, and have only 1 package that depends on python...and then you remove its dependencies and the package itself, python will be removed too. The last line of code won't reinstall python because now there are no homebrew packages that depend on it.

Seems deps not the same:

brew uninstall python3
Error: Refusing to uninstall /usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.6_1
because it is required by cairo, ffmpeg, glib, harfbuzz, libass, numpy, pybind11, tbb and vim, which are currently installed.
You can override this and force removal with:
  brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies python3

brew deps python3
gdbm
openssl@1.1
readline
sqlite
xz

Now, it may be easier to instead run:

$ brew uninstall [FORMULA]

$ brew deps [FORMULA] | xargs -n1 brew uninstall

xargs -n1 will force xargs to only take one argument at a time, so you'll have the same number of calls to `brew uninstall as number of dependencies. Then you can rely on brew to decide whether a dependency isn't required anymore (so it'll uninstaall it) or if the dep is required by something else that brew call will fail and xargs will move on.

@mrgloom , brew deps will show what kegs a formula depends on; the uninstall error message is telling you what other formula depend on the one you're trying to uninstall (or "reverse-dependencies"). you can show these with:

$ brew uses --installed [FORMULA]

Hey, so depending on the FORMULA that you're uninstalling this command can be quite dangerous

brew deps [FORMULA] | xargs brew remove --ignore-dependencies

If the formula has a lot of dependencies that are required for other packages, stuff get broken :(

This problem is more robustly solved by something like brew rmtree

Just a small suggestion of an improvement on that last line:

brew missing | cut -d: -f2 | tr ' ' "\n" | sort | uniq | xargs brew install

So that duplicates are really removed.

Original source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/41748156/1521064

brew autoremove

brew autoremove

It works!

brew uninstall [formula] ; brew autoremove

FTW