Uninstalling programs silently via CMD

Is there a way I can uninstall programs without the graphical interface and doing it via CMD?

Solution 1:

Every program that properly installs itself according to Microsoft's guidelines makes a registry entry in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall. Usually, the key for the program will be its GUID, or else the name of the program. Within that key will be an entry called UninstallString. This contains the command to execute to uninstall the program.

If you already know ahead of time what you will be uninstalling, it should be easy enough to just put that in your batch file. It gets tricky when you try to automate that process though. You can use the reg command to get data from the registry, but it returns a lot of text around the actual value of a given key, making it hard to use. You may want to experiment with using VBscript or PowerShell, as they have better options for getting data from the registry into a variable.

Solution 2:

You can invoke the correct uninstaller without knowing the GUID, etc. by using WMIC.

To see a list of the names of the programs as known internally by Windows:

wmic product get name

Look for your product name. It probably matches the one listed in the "Programs and Features" control panel, but not always.

Then you can use

wmic product where name="_my_product_name" call uninstall

to perform the uninstall, which AFAIK should be silent (it has been in my experience, but try it before you bet the farm on that. Silence may depend on how your installer/uninstaller was built).

See here for more:

• WMIC: the best command line tool you've never used (overview of WMIC with lots of cool commands described)
• Windows: Uninstall an Application from the Command Line (the specific recipe)

There's also reference documentation for WMIC on microsoft.com.