Today I’ll show you how to uninstall acme.sh, which is a shell script to get TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt and ZeroSSL.

I originally used acme.sh to generate a certificate locally on my MacBook, to be used on my FRITZ!Box. I stopped using this method, but I noticed whenever I opened my Terminal I’d see:

You have new mail.

Which were all by the Cron Daemon… as it turns out, acme.sh installed itself as cron job, and kept obtaining (or trying to obtain) certificates.

Running which acme.sh shows me where it’s installed, but just purging it is not the correct way as that will leave things behind.

Instead, simply run:

acme.sh --uninstall

Which will also clean cron job(s) and alias(es). It will also tell you about where keys and certs are stored, in my case in ~/.acme.sh, so we clean up the rest with:

rm -rf ~/.acme.sh

(Adjust to the path which the uninstallation told you about).

Dealing with “mails”

As for the “mails”, use a program like mutt to read/delete system mails properly. However, if you don’t care, you can simply purge them with:

echo -n > /var/mail/$(whoami)

I hope I helped you out. :3