I'm trying to clean up my usr/local folder in OSX 10.13

Question

OSX (Darwin 17.6.0) Node (v0.12.2) and NPM (v 2.7.4) are installed. I'm not sure if I used Homebrew to install anything (because there's 'Cellar' folder), but I've deleted Hombrew.

I've been trolling through stack overflow for hours (being new to this) trying to remove old/not used files. I think I might have installed things using 'sudo' (whups). Why I think this: NPM gives me a bunch of ERR! and code EACCES errno -13.

What files and folders in the local/bin, local/Cellar, and local/lib, man files etc... can I manually delete to get to back to ground zero? I'm pretty sure that I wont be using bower, claymate, gulp, grunt, or yo. Lord know why I installed them....

Or do I sudo update/upgrade/uninstall something, or root update/upgrade/uninstall something? I'm not positive about the differences.

Answer 1

According to the Homebrew Documentation FAQ:

Apple has assigned this directory [/usr/local] for non-system utilities. Which means there is no files in /usr/local by default, so there is no need to worry about messing up existing or system tools.

This means that you can run:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/*

whithout breaking any system level tools or libraries. Then reinstall any third party tool you need.