How does uninstall and clean work behind the curtain?

[pingshunhuangalex]

I'm looking to give Mole a go, but I'm a bit worried about the nature of the tool, i.e. deletion.

Just wondering,

1. How does it "smart" uninstall an app behind the curtain? Will it look for the built-in uninstall script before trying to recursively delete things "manually"?
2. What if the app is already removed? Will it be smart enough to know certain apps have been removed and scan for leftovers?
3. If I don't want Mole to empty my bin during the clean-up, what's the right way of doing it? White-listing the bin? Is there a whitelist I can refer to to get myself started?
4. Is there a way to undo the cleaning?
5. Look for a way to sync all the settings (by gathering all the settings files), so it can be easily synced and managed on GitHub.

Thanks.

[tw93]

@pingshunhuangalex Good questions, and being cautious about a deletion tool is the right instinct. Point by point.

1. How uninstall works. It never executes an app's own uninstaller, and it does not recursively guess. Leftovers are located from exact evidence only: the bundle ID and the app path. Name variants are allowed, generic collision words are rejected, short names have a length floor, and broad locations like Preferences/ByHost are skipped. Homebrew-installed apps are routed through brew rather than deleting files underneath it. You see the full file list and confirm before anything moves.

There is one case where it refuses outright and hands you back to the vendor: endpoint-security and MDM agents (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, ESET, Jamf, GlobalProtect, Cisco Secure Client). Force-deleting those trips tamper detection that corporate security tooling reports as malware, so Mole names the vendor and tells you to use their official uninstaller instead. Their caches under /private/var/folders are protected from clean for the same reason.

2. Already-removed apps. Yes, mo clean has an orphan scan for data whose parent app is gone. It requires exact bundle evidence, keeps a protected list for sensitive data (credentials, sessions, active databases), and skips anything it cannot positively attribute.

3. Keeping your Trash. mo clean --whitelist manages protected entries interactively, and Trash is whitelistable there. Whitelisted items are skipped on every subsequent run.

4. Undo. This differs per command, and it is worth knowing exactly:

• mo uninstall moves to Trash by default, so it is recoverable. --permanent opts out.
• Deleting from mo analyze moves to Trash, also recoverable.
• mo clean deletes permanently. It targets rebuildable caches, so there is no undo. mo clean --dry-run prints every path it would touch, which is the intended way to review first.

mo history records what happened but is read-only auditing, not a restore mechanism.

5. Settings sync. Not supported, and not planned. Syncing a cleanup tool's protection rules across machines means a machine could inherit rules written for different installed software, which is the kind of ambiguity this tool tries to avoid.

Start with mo clean --dry-run. It changes nothing and shows you the whole plan.