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NameUndecided

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 28, 2011
751
68
Hello!

I was wondering if it's safe or advisable or if there's some better method for deleting the folders for long-ago uninstalled programs from my MacBook's 'Library' folder.

For instance -- I have not had Parallels installed on my computer for forever, but I just found that it has a folder in Library that's almost 2gb in size. It's the same for a few other programs that are no longer installed on my Mac.

I found all of this out earlier today when I saw that "Reader Library Launcher" was suddenly taking up lots of memory while attempting to run on my computer. This was part of a Sony Reader app that I haven't had installed for a long time. I tried to uninstall it in a more "proper" way by downloading and installing the app and then officially uninstalling it, but the "Reader Library Launcher" persisted and kept trying to run according to my Activity Monitor. So I finally just deleted that folder from Library and it all seems to be resolved now.

So, should it be okay for me to just clean out my Library folder for other programs in this same way? So long as the app is no longer actually [supposed to be] installed, I'm probably okay to delete from Library, yes?

By the way, I do use AppZapper to uninstall apps, so I would have thought this not even be an issue. But here I am.

Thanks very much for any help!
 
You can safely delete them. Even if the app is still installed you could delete the support directory as it will just recreate it next time it launches although you would lose all configuration information that was stored in it.
 
Thanks for confirming! Though it would have been hilarious, in a terrible way, if my computer broke because I deleted the old database files for some minor piece of software that I never used.
 
There are lots of good reliable apps in the app store which will search for associated files and folder when deleting apps to get them entirely deleted AppCleaner is one which is free in the App Store. This won't help you for previous uninstalled apps but is a great tool for the future uninstalls.
 
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