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

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
[email protected]
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