Meandering Soul

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Chrome cleanup

30
Nov 2013

Google Chrome’s automatic updating is very much awesome. But it has one big disadvantage for people like me who don’t like unused junk on their hard disks. And old versions of programs belong to unused junk. Fortunately, there is an easy way to remove all old versions of Chrome (works for the default and the beta/dev channels, people using the canary channel simply have to swap out the application name):

Using the Finder

Navigate to Applications and select “Show Package Contents” on Google Chrome. You should be presented with something along the lines of the below picture.

Navigate to the Contents/Versions directory. In there, you can delete all directories except the one with the highest number - that’s the version you’re currently on.

Using the Terminal

On a command prompt, enter

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[[ $(ls /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/Versions \
| wc -l) -gt 1 ]] && \
rm -rf $(ls /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/Versions \
| sort | sed \'$ 0\')

If you’re unsure, which version your Chrome is currently running on, simply open a new tab and navigate to

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chrome://version
  • Published on November 30, 2013
  • 186 words