How to remove everything related to TeX Live for fresh install on Ubuntu?

Question

How can I remove everything that is related to TeX Live from my Ubuntu 12.04? I first used the backport packages from ppa:texlive-backports/ppa and later the manual install via install-tl-unx.tar.gz. Somehow, everything screwed up, so I want to remove everything to start from scratch.

I want to get a recent TeX Live with Biber support and extended font support, i.e. support for Source Sans Pro.

What to do?

Answer 1

Try the following commands, one after another. If you progress, respective folders may already be deleted:

1. sudo apt-get purge texlive*

2. sudo rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/* and rm -rf ~/.texlive*

3. sudo rm -rf /usr/local/share/texmf

4. sudo rm -rf /var/lib/texmf

5. sudo rm -rf /etc/texmf

6. sudo apt-get remove tex-common --purge

7. rm -rf ~/.texlive

8. find -L /usr/local/bin/ -lname /usr/local/texlive/*/bin/* | xargs -r rm

   This finds all the files in /usr/local/bin which point to a location within /usr/local/texlive/*/bin/* and removes them; because we’ve already deleted all of /usr/local/texlive, these are dead links. To see which files are being deleted, replace xargs rm with xargs -t rm (or tee off to a log file, or whatever).

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Update

In case that - after the last command (8.) - your terminal returns something like this

rm: cannot remove '/usr/local/bin/deweb': Permission denied
rm: cannot remove '/usr/local/bin/dviconcat': Permission denied
rm: cannot remove '/usr/local/bin/pkfix-helper': Permission denied
rm: cannot remove '/usr/local/bin/ulqda': Permission denied
rm: cannot remove '/usr/local/bin/kpsereadlink': Permission denied
rm: cannot remove '/usr/local/bin/bibmradd': Permission denied
...
...
...

if you know what you're doing, you can add sudo between the pipe and xargs rm, so that it becomes

find -L /usr/local/bin/ -lname /usr/local/texlive/*/bin/* | sudo xargs rm

or, to be more careful and also more thorough, follow the steps of this answer, which worked for me.

Update 2

Refer to this answer to solve the issue of rm: missing operand when running (8.)

Answer 2

Martin Betz's answer is great but it is missing one line that caused issue on my machine (Ubuntu 13.04). This was for upgrading from 2012 to 2013.

After 5., run sudo apt-get remove tex-common --purge. If not, you may have the problem I faced here Does TeXLive2013 need any special install instructions?

Answer 3

I think you should

1. remove all packages (via ubuntu's package manager and install-tl too)
2. remove /usr/{,local}/share/texmf*
3. remove texmf-releated things from /var/ (maybe /var/lib/texmf)
4. remove /etc/texmf too
5. your home directory: ~/.texlive

I think it's enough.

Answer 4

If you installed TeX Live using install-tl: sudo tlmgr remove --all.

Answer 5

For Ubuntu 18.04 LTS you can just use

sudo apt autoremove --purge texlive tex-common

This will delete configuration and/or data files of texlive and tex-common (and it's dependencies)

Answer 6

I would add to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS:

sudo rm ~/.local/bin/pdftex

sudo rm ~/.TinyTeX/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr

sudo rm ~/.local/bin/xetex

sudo rm ~/.local/bin/luatex

Those were needed for me when trying to install TinyTeX from scratch using the R package tinytex.