Uninstalling a python egg

Some very useful Python libraries are installed using setuptools using the following procedure:

sudo python setup.py install

Unfortunately, there's no similar command to remove (or uninstall) the library, once you've decided it's not needed.

Here's a quick howto on how to uninstall these libraries, even if it's already installed. There's one caveat, you must still have the original sources:

The first step is to (re)install the library:

sudo python setup.py install --record files.txt

And then, when you want to get rid of the files:

sudo rm $(cat ./files.txt)

Don't forget to remove the old source directory.