How to remove Avast Clean Up Software

I once installed Avast software (anti malware, cleanup, security). Several corresponding programs were installed. Due to continuously asking to install the full program suite, I decided to uninstall the Avast software. Stupid move of Avast, because their free program never asked to install the full Avast suite.

So I used their Avast Uninstall.app to remove the programs.

After a restart there was a leftover: 'Avast Cleanup'.

This app is a daemon process and it is not possible to trash it, because MacOs reports that it is 'open'.

You can show that it is running in the Activity Monitor. And a force quit does not work.

Command-Option-Escape shows the current apps and 'Avast Cleanup' is not displayed. So 'Avast Cleanup' cannot be closed or quit.

The only way to get rid of undeletable apps is to use Terminal and use a couple of shell commands.

The shell commands find and delete the directories and their contents.

Be very carefull, because you have to use root permission to execute them!

Any executed mistype results in a corrupt OS!

Unexperienced shell users should study shell commands.

Find the directories with the application software and data to delete:

sudo will ask for the administrator password of the Mac.

sudo find / -iname "*Avast*" -print | grep -v denied

This command shows all the directories in which Avast software resides.

On my Mac the leftover Avast Cleanup resides in the directory /Applications/AvastCleanup.app

This directory contains sub-directories that has to be deleted also.

The command rm to delete the application software and data:

sudo rm -rf /Applications/AvastCleanup.app/

The -rf keys: -r "recursive" -f "force" (suppress confirmation messages)

After a restart, there is no trace of 'Avast Cleanup' and is not started anymore.

sudo launchctl list|grep Avast

This procedure is usefull for any undeletable program. But always do a 'find', as described above, first!

Message was edited by: Paulus_2