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You are here: Home / Mac Q & A on Macs and macOS / Mac Q & A: How do I Delete a Program in OS X?

Mac Q & A: How do I Delete a Program in OS X?

October 25, 2009 by Mark Ratledge

My Mac Q & A Question: How do I delete a program in OS X? I used to use “Add and Remove” programs in Windows. C.D., Missoula

You can just drag the program folder to the trash. Your program should be in your Applications folder; if it’s not, use the “Find” command in your Finder to locate it.

Dragging the program folder to the trash will remove the program, and while there will be a few files left over in other places on your hard drive, they’re small and take up very little space, so it’s not absolutely necessary to remove them.

Those files are called “Preference” files, and they are located in either HardDrive/Library/Preferences/ or HardDrive/User/Library/Preferences/. See the difference in those directory paths? “User” is the name of your account. Some programs will have preference files in both locations.

Preference files usually have a suffix of “.plist” or might be called “preferences,” depending on the manufacturer. Most Apple program preference files are named like com.apple.nameofprogram.plist, so they’re easy to find. Other companies title their files beginning with their name.

But if you leave those small files where they are, they won’t cause problems. And if you’re not sure of what you’re removing in the Preferences folders, don’t remove it.

And if you have trouble emptying the trash after you’ve dropped a program folder in it, you can force empty the trash by holding down the Option key while selecting “Empty Trash.”


Related Posts:
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  • Mac Q & A: My External Disks are Full
  • Mac Q & A: Downloaded Disk Images that won’t Mount
  • Mac Q & A: Setting a Default Program
  • Mac Q & A: Moving an iTunes Library

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