For a CI task, I need to run a command in an environment where certain Homebrew packages are NOT present (in my case, [email protected], openssl@3 and readline). These packages are preinstalled in the Github CI runner that I use, and many other preinstalled packages depend on them.

Though I can use brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies, this will break all the dependent packages which will break my CI job later if it happens to involve any of them. Though I can track that, too, that’s not future-proof.

So I would rather like to uninstall the above packages AND everything that depends on them, recursively (effectively, the reverse of Uninstall / remove a Homebrew package including all its dependencies).

There doesn’t seem to be a built-in brew subcommand for that. Since I’m probably not the first person with this task — maybe there’s a Homebrew plugin command? I couldn’t find one.