[OT] Flash uninstaller (was: gross error)

[Scott Haneda]

On Jul 9, 2010, at 3:40 AM, Joshua Root wrote:

> On 2010-7-9 14:20 , Scott Haneda wrote:
>> On Jul 8, 2010, at 5:40 PM, John B Brown wrote:
>> 
>>> 	My current problems had better not have anything to do with MacPorts; I wiped all that stuff I could find. My problem is with Adobe Flash new dmg not running the graphics on Firefox.
>> 
>> When I ran the latest update from Apple, I had the same problems. I had to reinstall Flash clean, which means deleting all the little bits it left laying around in various places.  Just reinstalling did not work, and I could not find an uninstaller, nor do I believe it would get all the pieces.
> 
> <http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/uninstall_flash_player_osx.dmg>

Yeah, that also lives in Utilities/Adobe/Some/place/of/various/uninstallers.

I have ok luck sometimes, others not.  If you install CS5, and tell it to just install PS5, it will install all other apps too, as a somewhere around 20k app, with an X on the app, that can't be launched.  Adobe's un/installers are a complete mess.

I like to run a:
    touch ~/Desktop/timestamp
Then I go install whatever it is that Adobe asks me to install
I do nothing else during that install that I could not remember what it is I was up to
I then run the following command:  
    sudo find -x / -newer ~/Desktop/timestamp >> ~/Desktop/Adobe_installed-`date "+%m.%d.%Y-%H.%M.%S"`.txt

I have that wrapped up in a little shell script that is interactive, but you get the idea.  It will log all files newer than "timestamp", so I have a list of exactly what was installed and could have messed up my system.  I keep that file in the same location as the app that was installed.  It needs some work to exclude /tmp and other misc files that are made, or always changing, or browser tmp files since you will get bored and want to surf around a bit.

This has saved my butt so many times when installing a printer driver, SATA card driver, etc, as they all install things that their uninstaller miss. AAMOF, their uninstallers tend to miss more than they get.
-- 
Scott (* For off-list contact, replace talklists@ with scott@ *)