You might get this console message when uninstalling homebrew
➜ ~ sudo /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/uninstall.sh)"
Password:
Warning: This script will remove:
/Users/localadmin/Library/Caches/Homebrew/
/Users/localadmin/Library/Logs/Homebrew/
/opt/homebrew/.dockerignore
/opt/homebrew/.editorconfig
/opt/homebrew/.git/
/opt/homebrew/.github/
/opt/homebrew/.gitignore
/opt/homebrew/.shellcheckrc
/opt/homebrew/.sublime/
/opt/homebrew/.vale.ini
/opt/homebrew/.vscode/
/opt/homebrew/CHANGELOG.md
/opt/homebrew/CONTRIBUTING.md
/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/
/opt/homebrew/Dockerfile
/opt/homebrew/LICENSE.txt
/opt/homebrew/Library//
/opt/homebrew/README.md
/opt/homebrew/bin/brew
/opt/homebrew/completions/
/opt/homebrew/docs/
/opt/homebrew/manpages/
Are you sure you want to uninstall Homebrew? This will remove your installed packages! [y/N] y
==> Removing Homebrew installation...
==> Removing empty directories...
==> /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/find /opt/homebrew/bin /opt/homebrew/etc /opt/homebrew/include /opt/homebrew/lib /opt/homebrew/opt /opt/homebrew/sbin /opt/homebrew/share /opt/homebrew/var /opt/homebrew/Frameworks -name .DS_Store -delete
==> /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/find /opt/homebrew/bin /opt/homebrew/etc /opt/homebrew/include /opt/homebrew/lib /opt/homebrew/opt /opt/homebrew/sbin /opt/homebrew/share /opt/homebrew/var /opt/homebrew/Frameworks -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} ;
==> Homebrew uninstalled!
The following possible Homebrew files were not deleted: # <-- Interesting section starts here. WTF uninstaller?!
/opt/homebrew/Frameworks/
/opt/homebrew/SECURITY.md
/opt/homebrew/bin/
/opt/homebrew/etc/
/opt/homebrew/include/
/opt/homebrew/lib/
/opt/homebrew/opt/
/opt/homebrew/sbin/
/opt/homebrew/share/
/opt/homebrew/var/
You may wish to remove them yourself.The interesting bits here are the list of directories that the brew uninstaller did NOT take out for you.
There are several reasons why this might make sense - one that comes to mind for me is a lot of
the stuff downloaded to these directories are pretty chunky utilities, so should you turn around and
do a re-install, you'll have an easier time getting up to speed if your issue wasn't "universal" like mine
was (in my case, I was running in compatibility mode (via Rosetta), but also needed to do stuff that expected homebrew
to be installed in a different path than the default for arm64).
Should you still want to clean these out, here's a shell script you can run:
# /some/where/clean-homebrew.sh
HOMEBREW_PREFIX="/opt/homebrew"
if ! [ -d "$HOMEBREW_PREFIX" ]; then
HOMEBREW_PREFIX="/usr/local/homebrew"
fi
cat << EOF
Working with Homebrew prefix: ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}
EOF
stragglers=(Frameworks SECURITY.md bin etc include lib opt sbin share var)
force_clean() {
for xpath in ${stragglers[@]}; do
TARGET_ABS_PATH="$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/$xpath"
if [ -f "$TARGET_ABS_PATH" ]; then
echo "Target ${TARGET_ABS_PATH} is a file! Removing..."
rm -v $TARGET_ABS_PATH
else
if [ -d "$TARGET_ABS_PATH" ]; then
echo "Target ${TARGET_ABS_PATH} is a directory! Removing..."
rm -Rvf $TARGET_ABS_PATH
else
echo "Target ${TARGET_ABS_PATH} not found"
fi
fi
done
}
force_clean