Problem: I am fed up with unnecessary installers installing stuff all over my clean and lean system w/o giving me any clues on where they left their droppings. Apple's OS X standard installer gives file lists of to-be-installed files, but there are many other crappy installers that don't. I already asked quite some time ago on this board if there was some free utility that could take snapshots of the entire file system and compare before and after installs, but I didn't get any useful links.
Dislaimer: This morning in the shower I came up with a very simple 5-minute solution to the problem that requires no extra software and almost no time to execute. It works, but it's very simple. So forgive me if it seems too trivial to you or if you think you could have come up with it yourself. Of course you could, this is very simple and not very original, but since nobody mentioned it to me, I figured maybe somebody else could run into similar problems and would also like to know about this solution.
Solution:
• Open a shell and type
Code:
sudo du -a / > ~/Desktop/before
This might take a few minutes depending on the size of your file system(s)
• Do the install, uninstall or whatever else you wanted to do in the first place
• When done, type in the shell
Code:
sudo du -a / > ~/Desktop/after
and be patient again.
• In the shell type
Code:
diff ~/Desktop/before ~/Desktop/after
• The output tells you what has changed on your file system in the meantime, i.e. either files added, removed, or files that have changed in size or location. But, it won't detect files that have been altered w/o changing name, location or size (i.e. if the installer flips a simple flag bit in an existing file chances are you won't notice)
What's still missing:
• Ways to exclude entire partitions (-> du -I foo can be used to exclude entries matching 'foo') or certain sub-directories like /Users/somebody/.Trash which aren't relevant
• Checksums?
• A nice shell script that does everything automatically and also removes the tmp files when it's done
• A nice AppleScript app that visualizes the output, allows double-clicking the entries to open Finder windows showing the parent folder, etc.
Any volunteers?
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