I had many inconsistencies with two Anaconda environments that I had installed on my mac operating system, so I got advice on how to remove one of the environments and did so.

However, I think I would like to start from the beginning and remove the base environment. I tried to use anaconda-clean but because of a “setuptools” dependency of conda it cannot be removed from conda’s operating environment.

Preparing transaction: done
Verifying transaction: failed

RemoveError: ‘setuptools’ is a dependency of conda and cannot be removed from conda’s operating environment.

I tried to use

rm -rf ~/anaconda3 

at the terminal but nothing appears to happen and when I check with

conda env list

it still shows that I have anaconda installed as a base environment

# conda environments:
#
base                  *  /opt/anaconda3

How would I go about completely remove this and starting fresh?