Joshua Marinacci's Blog

How to remove Java 6 from your Mac

The Java 6 developer preview (b88) for Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) does not run on 10.5 (Leopard). Having it still installed can cause a few problems with Leopard. In fact, using it on Tiger can cause issues because it's so different from Java 6 final that ships for Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Because of this I recommend you delete it and wait for the final Java 6 for Mac. (Apple no longer makes this older version available on their download site either).

A few people have asked me how to remove Java 6 from their Mac, recently, and I realized that there isn't an uninstaller to make it easy. So here's what to do, taken directly from this post by Scott Kovatch, an Apple Java developer.

From the Terminal type these commands

rm ~/Library/Caches/Java/deployment.properties
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0
sudo rm /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6

That's it. You'll have 1.5 as the default again. If you have a folder named 'Java SE 6' in /Applications/Utilities/Java, delete that too.

Scott

That should getcha goin'. I'm mainly posting this so it gets picked up by the Google bots. Pics from Prague coming soon. Thanks.

Update

This just in from Scott Kovatch again: "updating to 10.5.1 will take care of it too. We now clean up the non-working versions of Java 6 during the update.". Thanks Scott.

Comments

• I swear that something removed it automatically before 10.5.1... either one of the last Leopard betas or 10.5 itself, or XCode, I don't know. But, a few weeks back, I went looking for it in /System/ Library/ Frameworks/ JavaVM.framework/ Versions and most of it was already gone, except for like one file in Commands (javah or something).

  Posted by: invalidname on November 19, 2007 at 02:43 AM

• Speaking of which, how about adding new 1.6 preview made directly for Leopard: http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/macosx/MacOS_Java_16_Developer_Preview_1.20071120.html

  Posted by: rah003 on November 20, 2007 at 02:22 PM

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