[rsh]

Hey guys,

I know questions like these are quite common and I've searched the boards for answers. I'm writing a script that will essentially clean a system of files leftover after an uninstall. This is for OS X.

For example, it deletes a default document located in "UserName/Library/Default Document.doc". It also deletes all the files associated with Application in ~/Library/Preferences and /Library/Preferences. I would also like it to delete keychain entries associated with Application, but that's probably another topic.

Here's what I've got so far:

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
from os.path import expanduser

## here I really want ALL "com.application.*" files. ##
defaults = "/Library/Preferences/com.application.file.plist"

## this is the default location ##
library = r'/Documents/Default\ Document.doc'

home = expanduser("~")
defaults_path = os.path.join(home, defaults)
library_path = os.path.join(home, library)
 
## delete defaults ##
if os.path.isfile(defaults_path):
        os.remove(defaults_path)
	print("Removed defaults.")
else:    ## Show an error ##
        print("Error: %s file not found. Do you need to be running sudo?" % defaults_path)

## delete library ##
if os.path.isfile(library_path):
        os.remove(library_path)
	print("Removed library.")
else:    ## Show an error ##
        print("Error: %s file not found. Do you need to be running sudo?" % library_path)

## delete keychain ##

The first delete works fine; the second gives me the error. I think I'm not properly escaping the space. Also, it doesn't look like the expand user code is working at all (the print out is "Error: /Documents/Default\ Document.doc file not found. Do you need to be running sudo?").

Any thoughts or advice or criticism is greatly appreciated!

[b49P23TIvg]

OS X is Open Systems unix (I'm good with that)
modified by Apple (in which text file line-ends are CR and other changes I don't know about)

The backslash looks completely wrong. Remove it.
library = r'/Documents/Default\ Document.doc'

Rationale: os.remove probably calls unlink (or remove which calls unlink) with the string file name. This is not the same at all as the shell command

rm 'file name containing white space'

in which you must quote the characters that the shell would otherwise separate tokens. The shell removes the quoting characters.

You've actually put a backslash into the file name.

[dwblas]

The OP want to delete a file with a space in the name "UserName/Library/Default Document.doc". I would suggest that it be tried with a plain space and see what happens. There are also some tricks, er workarounds, that I have seen used.

name = "UserName/Library/Default" + chr(32) + "Document.doc"

and some double quoting, but I don't remember which way it went, single, double, space, double, single, or vice-versa
name = "UserName/Library/Default" + '" "' + "Document.doc"

[rsh]

Thanks for the replies. I've tried removing the escaping "\" in the string. I also tried putting an r in front to indicate literal. I've also changed how I use expanduser:

library = expanduser('~/Documents/Default Document.doc')

Now it's calling the correct path, but I'm still getting the error:

Error: /Documents/Default Document.doc file not found. Do you need to be running sudo?

[rsh]

Got it. The literal worked with the space. I was using "Default Doc.doc" as an example, but really I wanted to delete a package, which works like a directory. So I used:

if os.path.isdir(library):
     shutil.rmtree(library)

That did the job.

Now my goal is to delete ALL files which have the format "com.application.*". Do I need to do something along of the lines of creating an array, then checking for "com.application.*" and adding each item to the array with the full pathname. Then I can iterate through the array in the delete code?

[dwblas]

see glob.glob which allows meta-characters, something like
print glob.glob("/path/name/com.application.*") <-- note the asterisk

[rsh]

That does the job nicely, thanks.

Now it's just the keychains