Hello,
I'd like to offer my take but I don't know if it will fit the specifics of this thread if it's meant to be read by newbies. Anyway, my solution involves Unix command line and features such notions as an «application bundle id» which is usually the developer's name put in accordance with
a reverse domain names system notation. If a straight domain names system notation looks like «forums.macrumours.com» then the reverse of that will be «com.macrumours.forums» and this is how names of many folders and property lists generated by the installed application in question appear in your system.
With that in mind, here's a template I decided in favour of a while ago. The version of the command below only finds related files and folders:
Code:
sudo find -Ex / -iregex '.*(target_app_bundle_id*(target_app.?name)?.*|target_app.?name(.*|\.app))' ! -iregex '.*(browser1|browser2|browser3|browser.?4|any_folder_to_exclude_from_results).*' -prune
Designation:
target_app_bundle_id - application bundle id. Usually only a part of it matching the developer/company name proper (e.g. «macrumours») omitting such suffixes as
com,
org,
net etc. is sufficient.
target_app.?name - if the name of the application consists of two words with 1 whitespace character between them then its support files and folders may either contain the whitespace or may not. The combination «.?» in the application's name considers this possibility.
Since you most probably would like to exclude browsing results in order to focus solely on local files it's better to leave out these entries too. To do it you need to include names of all browsers installed in your system. The name
browser.?4 accounts for a slight chance that the name is two words separated by the 1 white space symbol.
I discovered that occasionally a name of an application could be confused by the command with a name of a completely unrelated resource and add an unintended entry to the results pool. Oftentimes this happens with folders whose names are part of the pathname. To diminish a risk of this unwanted inclusion I added the opportunity for the command to ignore all paths with the designated folder: you have to specify the folder's name by placing it instead of the placeholder
any_folder_to_exclude_from_results. The unwanted folders can be any folders containing irrelevant files and subfolders, such as "Developer" and "Pictures".
The posted command doesn't exhaust some peculiar situations and in these situations requires fine tuning, especially if the program creates folders the names of which contain only part of a usual naming scheme. The keyword "sudo" will prompt for your administrator password to perform search in the folders outside of your home folder where an application, as a rule, also installs its files and folders. Therefore, execute this command with caution and not before thoroughly investigating the application's installation schemes.
When you're confident that the search result is correct append the extension
Code:
-exec sudo cp -R {} .Trash/ ";" -exec sudo rm -R {} ";"
to the command above and run it again. Put a space before the extension. This extended version will find the files and folders, remove them from their installation location and put to the Trash so you could see what's deleted and then erase for good should you decide so.
This solution won't do with regard to the likes of Adobe that has an extremely sophisticated and, for this reason, unfriendly installation scheme. In this situation, you have no choice but to fall back on using their provided uninstallers.
