Shell One Liner to Remove Bad Finalizer From Kubernetes Resources

shell-one-liner-remove-bad-finalizer.sh

# Swap pod for any resource you need to iterate over. (ie daemonset, deployment)

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces | tail -n+2 | awk '{print $1 " " $2}' | xargs -L1 bash -c "kubectl patch -n \$0 pod/\$1 --type=merge -p \$(kubectl get -n \$0 pod/\$1 -o json | jq -Mcr '.metadata.finalizers // [] | {metadata:{finalizers:map(select(. != \"name-of-bad-finalizer\"))}}')"

If you want to be safe from race conditions and lost updates, you got to use kubectl replace and pass whole resource so that resourceVersion is checked. Something like this for a single-resource version:

kubectl get -n $ns $res $name -o json | jq -Mcr "if .metadata.finalizers != null then del(.metadata.finalizers[] | select(. == \"name-of-bad-finalizer\")) else . end" | kubectl replace -n $ns $res $name -f -