CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitmacoshomebrew
Eddie
Eddie

Reputation: 13

Homebrew Uninstall Issue/Unsure if I deleted important files

I was having issues with Git on my Mac and eventually found a thread that said uninstalling Homebrew might help.

I found the uninstall command and pasted it into Terminal.

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/uninstall)"

It did its thing and at the end of the process it said something along the lines of:

Homebrew was unable to uninstall these files. Perhaps you should do it manually.

/usr/local/.yardopts
/usr/local/CODEOFCONDUCT.md
/usr/local/.com.apple.installer.keep
/usr/local/remotedesktop/
/usr/local/etc/
/usr/local/Homebrew/
/usr/local/var/
/usr/local/Library/
/usr/local/README.md
/usr/local/.gitignore
/usr/local/CONTRIBUTING.md
/usr/local/SUPPORTERS.md
/usr/local/lib/
/usr/local/.git/
/usr/local/LICENSE.txt
/usr/local/git/
/usr/local/share/

Trusting this recommendation, I checked out a few of the files and folders, many of them were related to Homebrew so I did as it said and deleted the following:

/usr/local/.yardopts
/usr/local/CODEOFCONDUCT.md
/usr/local/.com.apple.installer.keep
/usr/local/remotedesktop/
/usr/local/etc/
/usr/local/Homebrew/
/usr/local/Library/
/usr/local/README.md
/usr/local/.gitignore
/usr/local/CONTRIBUTING.md
/usr/local/SUPPORTERS.md
/usr/local/.git/
/usr/local/LICENSE.txt

When I emptied the trash I noticed that it said it was deleting over 10,000 files and I got worried, did some research but couldn't find much of what might be in these folders. I tried to restore a TimeMachine back up and it looks like my back up drive is busted.

So my question is did I delete anything of importance and will I regret this later? I'm mostly worried about usr/local/Library/, as in retrospect this sounds important.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2777

Answers (1)

matt
matt

Reputation: 534885

/usr/local belongs to you, so the only thing you can mess up by deleting stuff there is stuff that you yourself installed. You cannot possibly mess up anything important to the fundamental operation of your Mac, since on a clean installation /usr/local is effectively empty.

Moreover, your installation of Homebrew is effectively just a copy of this:

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew

Whatever you see on that page was simply reflected right into your usr/local (including the Library folder that worries you).

Finally, the number of files involved is not an indication of anything. After all, consider that the .git directory contains the entire repository history of homebrew itself. It's easy to see how that alone could consist of thousands of files.

Upvotes: 4

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