Uninstall chaos

[alinesantaizabel]

Hi,

I was trying to remove avast from macOS Sierra to trail another provider, but none of the easily googled ways helped.
Someone trying to help lent in and moved parts of the internal workings to of avast to the trash, then cleared the trash bin.

So now I have an un-openable version of Avast.
I can't re-install it because it still detects that it is present on my OS.
I can't un-install it because I don't know how to find and delete everything.
I can't install other anti-virus software because that also detects avast.

Is there a set of easy instructions you can give to get rid of the rest of avast so that I can re-install it or install something else?

Thanks very much for your help.

[ondrej.kolacek]

Please check out Jakub Bednar's response here:
https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=255554.0

[alinesantaizabel]

Thanks for your help Ondrej,

First I did as you suggested and removed the folders from terminal:
sudo rm -rf "/Applications/Avast.app"
sudo rm -rf "/Library/Application Support/Avast"

then re-”trashed” the avast app and it was removed from “devices” but this still didn’t work.
When I did:

>find . -name *avast* I still get a lot of entries below
They look innocent but I am not sure. Should I restrict the “find” command further?
It stalled out after the entries below so I don’t know whether the list is complete.

Thanks again.

./Library/Application Support/CrashReporter/com.avast.cleanup.scan_....plist
./Library/Caches/com.avast.AAFM
./Library/Caches/com.avast.hub.alpha
./Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/https:%2F%2Fapps.apple.com%2Fus%2Fapp%2Favast-security-photo-vault%....webhistory
./Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/https:%2F%2Fforum.avast.com%2F.webhistory
…(A lot from the web forum which I guess are innocent)
./Library/Cookies/com.avast.AAFM.binarycookies
./Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/com.avast.cleanup.scan_2021-03-31-123703_Alines-MacBook-Air.crash
./Library/Preferences/com.avast.AAFM.plist
./Library/Safari/LocalStorage/https_id.avast.com_0.localstorage
./Library/Safari/LocalStorage/https_id.avast.com_0.localstorage-shm
./Library/Safari/LocalStorage/https_id.avast.com_0.localstorage-wal
./Library/Safari/LocalStorage/https_support.avast.com_0.localstorage
./Library/Safari/LocalStorage/https_support.avast.com_0.localstorage-shm
./Library/Safari/LocalStorage/https_support.avast.com_0.localstorage-wal
./Library/Safari/LocalStorage/https_www.avast.com_0.localstorage
./Library/Safari/LocalStorage/https_www.avast.com_0.localstorage-shm
./Library/Safari/LocalStorage/https_www.avast.com_0.localstorage-wal

[jakub.bednar]

Hello,

all of them are innocent and you should be able to re-install Avast or any other AV without issues.

The paths that include Safari and Cookies are from our web pages. Feel free to remove them if you want.
The paths in CrashReporter and DiagnosticReports are system files collected when one of our tools crashed while you were using Avast.

The 2 paths that really belong to Avast are:
./Library/Caches/com.avast.AAFM
./Library/Preferences/com.avast.AAFM.plist
They are small in size (I would say few kilobytes). Feel free to remove them but they are harmless. Some cache data and your user-defined preferences for Avast.

Best regards,

Jakub

Best regards,

Jakub