Special Characters for Createfile

Content Authoring
1

I am needing to create a task to delete a particular HKEY Current User key, however the character { is not being allowed. unfortunately, its the key that has to be removed. Here is a snippet of the part that fails…

createfile until endfile
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID{AB8902B4-09CA-4bb6-B78D-A8F59079A8D5}]
endfile
move __createfile c:\Temp\Powelik.reg
waithidden C:\Temp\RunAsCurrentUser.exe -s regedt32 /s c:\Temp\Powelik.reg

Having the { in the line is causing it to fail and not sure how to be able to include it.

Thanks.

2

My first post omitted a backslash that was needed…

createfile until endfile
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID{AB8902B4-09CA-4bb6-B78D-A8F59079A8D5}]
endfile
move __createfile c:\Temp\Powelik.reg
waithidden C:\Temp\RunAsCurrentUser.exe -s regedt32 /s c:\Temp\Powelik.reg

3

Curly brackets perform special functions within actionscript (relevance substitution), and so we’ll need to escape it. Here is a good Technote about this: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21506259

Note of course given that you are attempting to remove a registry value from HKCU, there can be challenges. Leveraging RunAsCurrentUser can help, but an alternate approach is to dynamically build a .reg file that will allow you to remove the specified key from any/all users defined under HKU. This has the advantage of being able to address multiple user configurations at once (if they exist), and does not require a user to be logged in.

4

cujo,

I have a similar task for this when I was doing our Splunk deployment that uses the action script without the need to use the appendfile or createfile. I had the uninstall command run from the key within the registry that already has the curly brackets in the name. The way I did it was to do this:

dos "MsiExec.exe /X{name of key whose (name of it contains "7988114D-E718-4AD1-BE40-825440565928") of key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall" of x64 registry} /qn"

Since there is only going to be one key with the matching name and it will include the curly brackets in the name, it did the trick.

5

Depending on the version of the client you are using (as I fixed this in a later release - I believe 9.0+) you can get a registry key of a user by:

current user key of registry
current user keys ( logged on users ) of registry

Only the agent can do this as it needs privilege but this will give you the hive of the user in question in the HKEY_USERS hive that you can use at any time and you don’t need to do things in the user’s context

6

Double up the first curly bracket so that you get something like this …

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID{{AB8902B4-09CA-4bb6-B78D-A8F59079A8D5}]

The closing curly bracket doesn’t need to be escaped.