how do you uninstall?

[LogicMan]

how do you uninstall software in mac os x?

[moav]

Just like you would throw away something you don't need in the real world; Put it in the trash can and have the garbage men take it from curbside.

[Giaguara]

that is normally enough. if you are not lazy, you could probably like to trash also the preferences the application had created, they are in Library/Preferences or ~/Library/Preferences. leaving them there does no harm though. the preferences of the application have the name in the file where it is, e.g. Safari's preferences would be in the com.apple.safari.plist file.

[OmegaMan]

Also, if you have the installer, there is sometimes an option to uninstall through that.....

[evildan]

I also like to grab those pesky "Application Support" items that may be in your Library and the main Library folders.

Not all applications put items in there, but some do and removing them is usually is the last thing to do to completely eliminate an unwanted installation.

There is, however, no "one way" to remove all installations. For no other reason then the fact that not all applications put everything in one directory.

For example an application might just install their items in the "Applications" folder. Others may install just in the "PreferencePanes" folder. And so on.

So how does an uninstaller know where everything exists? They can't and don't. It is left up to the user, then, to hunt down and remove all unwanted items from his/her own drive.

The trick is to start learning where some kinds of applications put things. You've already learned about three such places, "PreferencePanes", "Application Support", and "Applications" folders. Start looking at those folders for obvious items.

Good luck.

[LogicMan]

thanks everyone for all your responses.

[onan]

If it was installed as a Package, your system saves details on every file it installed. There aren't yet good gui tools to acsess this information and automate uninstalling, but the foundations for such a thing are there.

If comfortable with the commandline, you can access this information yourself. Within /Library/Receipts, you'll see packages for everything you've installed. Within each one, Contents/Archive.bom is the "bill of materials" that lists information about every file. You can read these files with lsbom, eg "lsbom Archive.bom | less".

You could then rm all these files, ideally through some scripted processing of lsbom's output. (I won't offer such a script here, as anyone who can't compose it probably would be better off not using it.)