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How to remove StuffIt completely from your Mac

Crossed-out StuffIt logoFor some reason StuffIt ended up getting installed on my wife’s iMac. All very well, but I started finding its presence, and its association with every zip file on the Mac, somewhat annoying and unnecessary (what with unzipping now being built into Mac OS). So I tried to uninstall it. Easier said than done! There’s no uninstaller, and what’s more, it insinuates itself into every nook and cranny of Mac OS, and is a pig to remove manually.

I was pretty chuffed, then, to discover this Automator script on StuffIt’s maker’s website. Download NukeStuffitMac, unzip, run, and wait (it takes a while), and every trace of StuffIt is removed from your Mac. Nice! (I found I needed to restart the Mac afterwards to finish the job completely.)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Mac tips & tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

8 Responses to “How to remove StuffIt completely from your Mac”

  1. Gideon Says:
    April 20th, 2008 at 6:30 am

    check out AppZapper. It is the tits!

  2. Weili Says:
    April 20th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

    If what bothered you was the fact that OS X was associating zip files to StuffIt, all you had to do was change this association. To do that, simply select a zip file, Get Info on it, select the application you DO want to use to open zip files, save, and done.

    There are still many files that OS X can’t open by default, but StuffIt can, such as .rar.

  3. Matt Says:
    April 20th, 2008 at 3:53 pm

    @Gideon: AppZapper does look pretty cool!

    @Weili: Already tried that, but couldn’t work out how to associate zip files with the default unarchiver utility. Where’s its executable?

  4. Charles Says:
    April 21st, 2008 at 3:14 am

    The advice from Weili is correct, he described the right way to associate a file type with an app.

    The MacOS X executable for .zip files is called “Archive Utility.app” in 10.5, and IIRC it was called BOMArchiveHelper in 10.4. Either of these apps should appear automatically as a choice when you Get Info and change the “Open With” popup.

  5. Matt Says:
    April 21st, 2008 at 7:26 am

    @Charles: That’s the problem – BOMArchiveHelper wasn’t in my “Open With” list, and when I clicked “Other” to open the file browser, I couldn’t find BOMArchiveHelper in the Applications folder. I’m sure it’s lurking around somewhere, but I confess I didn’t spend time hunting around for it!

  6. Bill Says:
    April 21st, 2008 at 7:56 am

    Check:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Utility

    It is in “/System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility.app”

  7. Matt Says:
    April 21st, 2008 at 7:59 am

    Great stuff! Thanks Bill. 🙂

  8. LarryF Says:
    June 11th, 2009 at 7:38 am

    I found that Stuffit would pop up and tell me that it didn’t recognize many different file types, such as *.mp4. Annoying as hell.