You probably got here while searching something like “how to remove webroot”, perhaps because it started popping up in security dialogs.
Webroot is anti-virus software, and it’s popular with large companies since it installs onto multiple platforms.
Mar 31, 2017 Update Mac App Store Software Using Terminal. By default, macOS does not contain a command line utility for updating apps from the Mac App Store. However, you can install Dmitry Rodionov’s mas utility to add this functionality to your command line.
Sadly, there’s something wrong with Webroot on MacOS, and that’s probably why you’re here. I’m writing this in Autumn 2019.
The webroot daemon is sucking your CPU and wrecking your performance.
Webroot High CPU usage
In my experience, Webroot hogs CPU constantly and runs down the battery. There are plenty of threads elsewhere on the internet, it seems like a lot of people are facing the same problem.
There have been speculations on forum threads that the issue may be related to Chrome, and Webroot’s web protection.
If open Activity Monitor and you find that a process called WSDaemon (Webroot) is constantly using a large percentage of your CPU, you’re having the same problem.
Webroot won’t uninstall.
Perhaps the webroot on your machine was installed by your company’s IT team. It may not give you the option to uninstall.
Looking for a workaround, you might try to uninstall Webroot by booting into safe mode and dragging the application into the trash. That’s what the support articles recommend.
On this Mac however, WSDaemon resurrected itself afterwards and got back to it’s old habits of burning up CPU cycles and refusing to die.
It’s frustrating to work on a laggy machine, and there are plenty of Google suggestions like webroot won't uninstall mac in the search results.
How to uninstall Webroot on a Mac
I found the command line uninstallation commands.
If you’re ready to completely remove Webroot SecureAnywhere from your Mac, paste the following commands into Terminal, which is a command line interface built into MacOS.
These came from an email that Webroot themselves sent to a user who was facing the same issue.
You can copy and paste them into terminal all at once, you don’t need to run them line by line.
If you see some permission denied errors, you might need to use sudo su before you try those commands.
Slaying the daemon
Once those commands have run, hopefully you have permanently killed the Webroot daemon and gotten your Mac back on track. Expect to see improvements to responsiveness, battery life and enjoy a quieter fan.
Unsolicited advice section
Ok, now for the unsolicited advice section. I’m not a security expert, just a developer, and I don’t work on security.
Do you need an anti-virus for MacOS?
I personally do not think that an off the shelf anti virus product is required to keep your Mac secure online. It depends on what you are doing of course, but for most users, the default MacOS security will keep you safe.
The newest release macOS Catalina seems to have taken security even more seriously, peppering the interface with security popups. The last thing I want to add is yet more security dialogs to my workflow.
Uninstall App Using Terminal Mac
Apple also seem to do a great job of pushing out security patches frequently.
So far, the majority of MacOS users have been safe from malware.
Ask your Mac friends if they have run into any trouble with ransomware or malware. I would wager most of them will say no. Except perhaps, the truly reckless users.
It seems to me that OS security is the responsibility of the OS vendor, and anti virus programs that claim to make improvements are always clunky and annoying.
When Malware causes a disaster
It is understandable that many organisations are happy to allocate a budget to “anti-virus” software if they feel that it does anything at all to reduce the risk of ransomware taking them out.
In 2018, a virus called WannaCry hit the computer system of the NHS (National Health Service) in the UK. It inflicted £92 million in damages.
In this case, however the NHS was running Windows XP.
There has been no similar disaster affecting MacOS.
Whether they do much to reduce the risk is up for debate.
In my opinion, if all you do is browse Facebook all day, you probably don’t need to pay for anti virus software. Just keep your OS and all of your software up to date.
If you are working in a very sensitive environment where all of the computers are networked together, and you are often opening attachments from people that you don’t know, you need to be more careful than the average user.
At the very least, you should think about the data that you can not afford to lose, and put some plan in place to back it up.
Terminal User Guide
Each window in Terminal represents an instance of a shell process. The window contains a prompt that indicates you can enter a command. The prompt you see depends on your Terminal and shell preferences, but it often includes the name of the host you’re logged in to, your current working folder, your user name, and a prompt symbol. For example, if a user named michael is using the default zsh shell, the prompt appears as:
This indicates that the user named michael is logged in to a computer named MacBook-Pro, and the current folder is his home folder, indicated by the tilde (~).
Open Terminal
On your Mac, do one of the following:
Click the Launchpad icon in the Dock, type Terminal in the search field, then click Terminal.
In the Finder , open the /Applications/Utilities folder, then double-click Terminal.
Quit Terminal
In the Terminal app on your Mac, choose Terminal > Quit Terminal.
Quit a shell session
In the Terminal app on your Mac, in the window running the shell process you want to quit, type
exit, then press Return.
This ensures that commands actively running in the shell are closed. If anything’s still in progress, a dialog appears.
Uninstall App Via Terminal Mac
If you want to change the shell exit behavior, see Change Profiles Shell preferences.