Using Ubuntu 24.04 (default - minimal - installation)
Firefox snap is all over my system. And now it is causing me trouble. I need to get rid of it -but I can’t. I’ve tried, of course the basic:
sudo snap remove firefox
I’ve tried to use the scripts kindly offered on this site and a similar script here. And they do remove a thing or two, but they both meet an unpassable barrier and get no further, leaving most of the “old snap versions” untouched
The barrier (error) “cannot perform the following tasks”:
Remove data for snap “firefox” (4793) (unlinkat /var/snap/firefox/common/host-hunspell/es_CU.dic: read-only file system)
Should I try to manually remove the offending file (seems to be a Spanish dictionary) If so how? (the “read-only file system” seems a bit daunting)
I have the same snap installed but only have the en_US.aff and en_US.dic files in that directory. They are owned by root:root with 644 permissions.
If you want to completely uninstall the Firefox snap, I don’t think it could hurt to manually remove that file. You’d probably have to use sudo permissions to it.
Afraid that doesn’t work. I am not “owner” of the files - (system) and cannot change the permissions of these files, far less delete them.
There are 52 files in the offending folder (/var/snap/firefox/common/host-hunspell) all with extension dic or aff; and all but 12 actually have rwx permissions for owner (root) and group (root), I suspect these dictionary files are used not so much by Firefox as by Thunderbird, where I use spellcheck.
What matters for me is not to get rid of the folder, but to remove old versions of snaps. The error message I referred to as “the barrier” interrupts the script.
I think the word “unlinkat” in that message is the clue.
All but 12 of the files look like this.
It looks like those are links to a file somewhere else. In any case you should be able to remove using sudo. I don’t know if that would affect Thunderbird. I would think not, especially using snaps. I kind of thought one of the primary benefits of using snaps/flatpak/appimage was that they contained all the requirements to run. Kind of self contained.
To be safe have a snapshot or backup before removing for sure.
Here is the snap clean script I use.
$ cat snap-clean.sh
#!/bin/bash
# Removes old revisions of snaps
# CLOSE ALL SNAPS BEFORE RUNNING THIS
set -eu
snap list --all | awk '/disabled/{print $1, $3}' |
while read snapname revision; do
snap remove "$snapname" --revision="$revision"
done
