Find Out What an Installer Put on Your Mac
Ever wonder what actually got installed on your Macintosh when you
applied an Apple Software Update, installed an application, or applied a
patch? Ever need to “completely remove” a Mac OS X
application but weren’t sure how to find everything it installed (not
everything goes in the “Applications” folder!)? This
article will help you solve that little problem.
Most installers, especially Apple’s own, save some files in the
“/Library/Receipts” folder on your Macintosh during
installation. The purpose of these files is to identify which
files are associated with which installation, and to give OS X
information about what UNIX permissions should be in effect for a given
file. The permissions information comes into play when you use the
Disk Utility’s “Repair Permissions” function. If the
permissions that the package in “/Library/Receipts” says a
file should have aren’t the permissions it actually has, Disk Utility
will change its permissions to match what the package tells it should be
used. That’s one reason why this is a critical location to include
in backup and recovery.
Suppose that you’ve tried to uninstall (or
simply use) an application and couldn’t. You’ve tried everything
you know and there still seems to be a problem. You suspect that
the application has left some files behind, but you don’t know what they
are. How can you be sure?
Launch a Terminal window (Terminal
is found under “/Applications/Utilities”). A prompt
similar to the following will appear:
Last
login: Mon Oct 17 13:03:24 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
PowerMac-G4:~ mike$
Change to
the “/Library/Receipts” directory and list the files found
there:
/Library/Receipts
PowerMac-G4:/Library/Receipts mike$ ls
-la
total 256
drwxrwxr-x 73 root
admin 2482 Oct 17 13:00 .
drwxrwxr-t 47 root
admin 1598 Oct 17 13:00 ..
-rw-rw-r– 1 mes27
admin 21508 Oct 17 13:01 .DS_Store
-r——– 1 root
admin 0 Oct 13 16:00
.SetupRegComplete
drwxrwxr-x 3 root
admin 102 Oct 14 14:55
ActivePerl-5.8.pkg
.
. <lines snipped here to reduce article
length>
.
drwxrwxr-x 3 root
admin 102 Oct 13 16:27 iTunes.pkg
drwxrwxr-x 3 root
admin 102 Oct 13 16:13 iTunesX.pkg
For this example, we’ll
look at what was installed on our system when we installed
“ActivePerl-5.8″, so we will change to the
“ActivePerl-5.8.pkg” directory (package files aren’t really
files but directories in disguise) and list its contents:
PowerMac-G4:/Library/Receipts mike$ cd
ActivePerl-5.8.pkg
PowerMac-G4:/Library/Receipts mike$ ls
Contents
PowerMac-G4:/Library/Receipts mike$ cd
Contents
PowerMac-G4:/Library/Receipts/ActivePerl-5.8.pkg/Contents
mike$ ls
Archive.bom
Info.plist
PkgInfo
Resources
The file that interests us most at
this point is the “Archive.bom” file, which contains a
“bill of materials” list of what was installed by the
installer. If we tried to look at this file in TextEdit or a
similar editor, it would look like the following gibberish:
Fortunately, OS X includes a utility that will
provide a readable list of the files installed in a given bill of
materials file:
PowerMac-G4:/Library/Receipts/ActivePerl-5.8.pkg/Contents
mike$ lsbom Archive.bom -pf
.
./bin
./bin/GET
./bin/HEAD
./bin/POST
./bin/SOAPsh.pl
./bin/XMLRPCsh.pl
./bin/a2p
.
. <lines snipped here to reduce article
length>
.
./man/man3/threads.3
./man/man3/threads::shared.3
./man/man3/utf8.3
./man/man3/vars.3
./man/man3/vmsish.3
./man/man3/warnings.3
./man/man3/warnings::register.3
This rather lengthy last details every file installed with
ActivePerl 5.8.7. If we were attempting to manually remove
ActivePerl from our system, we would need to locate and remove all of
these files. At that point, the application should be completely
gone.