ngopina / homebrew-rmtree

Remove a formula and its unused dependencies

homebrew-rmtree

Remove a formula and its unused dependencies

What is it?

It's an external command for Homebrew that provides a new command, rmtree, that will uninstall that formula, examine its dependencies and uninstall them as well if there are no remaining formula that depend on them. The command will check all dependencies recursively starting at the one specified on the command line.

This is tricky business. The command as it stands right now is pretty straight-forward. So this command comes with a warning.

Warning

There are formulas that do not specify all of their dependencies. This means that it is possible that this command will remove something you still need. Until someone comes up with a clever way around this, you need to be careful what you uninstall.

Usage

Although the script's name is brew-rmtree.rb, Homebrew external commands work in such a way that you invoke it as brew rmtree. (It functions exactly like a sub-command built into Homebrew.)

$ brew rmtree libmpc08
Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/libmpc08/0.8.1...
Found lingering dependencies
mpfr2
Removing dependency mpfr2...
Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/mpfr2/2.4.2...
Found lingering dependencies
gmp4
Removing dependency gmp4...
Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/gmp4/4.3.2...

Installation

You can install brew rmtree in two ways.

1. Tap this repository and install via brew itself.

   $ brew tap beeftornado/rmtree && brew install beeftornado/rmtree/brew-rmtree
   

2. Install manually.

   $ git clone https://github.com/beeftornado/homebrew-rmtree.git && cd homebrew-rmtree
   $ mv brew-rmtree.rb /usr/local/bin/ && chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/brew-rmtree.rb
   

Once you've installed via either method, you can use the command as described above.