How to delete a locked app using superuser privileges?

Question

Recently, I was trying to get software that re-maps my mouse's buttons. I stumbled upon a software named Karabiner-Elements, which has the ability to do many things relation to keybindings. After downloading I learned that it was not the software for me, and decided to manually delete it.

However, the application was "Locked", and I was unable to remove this lock, either from the inspector or the command line using chflags nouchg file, which I found linked to another post

• how to delete a locked app

I even tried the sacred sudo rm -rf, and was unable to remove it. The answer on that post was using the uninstaller that I stupidly ignored, and this worked.

However, I am still curious as to how an installed software was able to embedded itself so deeply into my computer that I was unable to delete it. I tried ls -lO which returned drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel. I am not sure what this means, other than the only way to delete this folder is through root. This leads me to my questions.

• How was this software able to lock itself?
• How would I go about deleting this software without using the uninstaller?
• Is this a potential security risk on UNIX devices?

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

Read the shell script:

/Library/Application Support/org.pqrs/Karabiner-Elements/uninstall_core.sh

or

• https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-Elements/blob/master/src/scripts/uninstall_core.sh

In summary:

• Unload the kernel extensions.
• Clear immutable flags nouchg,noschg from the apps.
• Remove the files from /Library and /Applications. Remember we used sudo with the script.
• Refresh kernel extension cache: kextcache.
• https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-Elements/blob/master/src/scripts/uninstall.sh
• Kill all orphan/ background processes if any.
• Prompt you to restart the computer.

Answer 2

Urm, Karabiner Elements literally has an Uninstall button right within its interface.