Hi Everyone,
I really need a BigFix Analyses that will return all of the Uninstall Strings from the registry. I have a huge project and am not savy enough to know how to retrieve this myself. I’m looking for something that does something similar to this: https://finduninstallstring.codeplex.com/
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!!
Hi,
This is fairly basic so we can walk through the relevance but I use the following analysis to obtain this kind of information: Applications - Windows on GitHub or Applications - Windows on BigFix.Me
The relevance in question would simply be:
keys of keys "HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\uninstall" of ( x32 registries;x64 registries)
Essentially this says, “Give me the names of all the keys in the uninstall path for the x64 and x32 registries.”
That will return the names of the keys which in most cases will be GUIDs.
The next common step is to get the value of the “DisplayName” property in the uninstall keys which you can get using:
values "DisplayName" of keys of keys "HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\uninstall" of ( x32 registries;x64 registries)Hey Strawgate, thanks so much! Can you give me the syntax that will also return the value of the key, something similar to this: MsiExec.exe /x{7BBAEC47-1CC0-4CB8-ADB4-531B78DBD1DD} That’s what I really need. Thanks!
Try this:
(values "DisplayName" of it, values "UninstallString" of it) of keys of keys "HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\uninstall" of ( x32 registries;x64 registries)The property, “Applications - Uninstall Strings - Windows” in the Analysis I linked above has that information – i’d recommend importing that analysis.
In most cases you won’t be able to use the “UninstallString” value within the registry to uninstall the software. In most cases the software vendor puts something in there that will show a UI and will not automatically uninstall the software in a way that can be done any way but by hand.
You can generate uninstallers for all MSI applications rather easily. I have about 6000 of them here: https://github.com/jgstew/bigfix-content/blob/master/fixlet/Tasks_UninstallApplicationsMSI_Windows.bes
These were automatically generated using some REST API automation. If your need is just to be able to uninstall MSI applications, then the automation I have will build the BigFix tasks to uninstall them quite easily.
Generally to uninstall MSI application, you want to use the GUID of the uninstall key directly and build the MsiExec command yourself with that GUID so that you can reasonably ensure that you are executing an uninstall command that can be automated without launching a GUI or rebooting the computer silently. EVEN SO, you still won’t be able to be certain that this is the case because some applications with require extra command line parameters to uninstall silently or to prevent reboots or to prevent launching of Internet Explorer at the end of the process. The only way to know is to test each one very carefully.
Jgstew
Your link opens a page without any information. What should we do here?