Uninstalling programs silently via CMD

Question

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

Answer 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.

Answer 2

If a program uses Windows Installer, you can use one of the following commands:

msiexec /q /x <ProductCodeGuid>
msiexec /q /x <PathToMsi>

However, you're likely have neither the product code nor the original MSI file used for installation.

Other than that, there is no generic uninstall command, since installers that do not make use of Windows Installer are "unknown" by the operating system. They might supply their own uninstall executable, but whether that executable includes a way to run it without GUI depends on the individual software package.

Answer 3

If you know where the MSI installer file is you can use:

Msiexec /uninstall Application.msi /quiet