[Tex/LaTex] How to remove everything related to TeX Live for fresh install on Ubuntu

installingtexliveUbuntu

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?

Best Answer

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).

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.)

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