There is no setup.py uninstall

Seems there’s no way to uninstall a Python application that you’ve installed with python setup.py install, short of manually scraping out the files it creates. I spent a short while this morning looking for some sort of python setup.py uninstall, but apparently it doesn’t exist.

Until the Python gurus can cue me in, I used this roundabout way to gut a misbehaving Python program from my system. After installing it and finding that it didn’t do what I wanted, I “reinstalled” it again with the same command, plus one flag.

python setup.py install --record files.txt

I got a nice clean list of files and their paths, which I could then conveniently “uninstall” with this:

cat files.txt | xargs rm -rf

It seemed to do the trick.