La Vita è Bella

In fact, to uninstall TeXLive should be very easy: "rm -Rf /usr/local/texlive", that's all.

But things are sometimes not so easy. If you've chosen to make symbolic links to your system path (/usr/bin) during the installation, like I had, then you have to unlink all the links TeXLive created.

It's hard to do that manually, so I wrote the following script. You just need to run it under your /usr/bin directory and it will unlink all links that pointed to /usr/local/texlive.

 1 #!/bin/sh
 2
 3 tlprefix="^/usr/local/texlive/"
 4
 5 for file in *; do
 6         if [ -L ${file} ]; then
 7                 link=`readlink ${file}`
 8                 tllink=`echo "${link}" | grep "${tlprefix}"`
 9                 if [ -n "${tllink}" ]; then
10                         echo "going to unlink \"${file}\" that links to \"${link}\"..."
11                         unlink ${file}
12                 fi
13         fi
14 done

It unlinked 240 symbolic links from my /usr/bin directory, horrible! I'll never choose the "make symbolic links to your system path" option again during the installation of TeXLive.