Wait for uninstaller to finish using batch - batch-file

Question

I would like to uninstall a few programs using batch and wait for each program to finish uninstalling before doing the other. The problem is that some of these uninstallers don't call other programs and aren't in the task manager, so START /WAIT wouldn't work. Any ideas would be helpful.

Answer 1

Assuming you are using Windows and that the programs were installed with .msi packages,
Uninstalling a program in a batch file is as easy as using MSIEXEC. Full documentation on using MSIEXEC can be found on Microsoft Technet
To find the GUID of the installation that you would like to Uninstall, just use wmic in Command prompt:
wmic product get > C:\InstalledProgramsList.txt
Then navigate to C:\InstalledProgramsList.txt and use ctrl + F to find the desired product and associated GUID

Answer 2

Ok. I think I got it. This is the code I'm using, where I created a subroutine that waits for the task to finish.
:waitforuninstallation
timeout /T 1 /NOBREAK >nul
tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq %1" 2>NUL | find /I /N "%1">NUL
if %ERRORLEVEL% EQU 0 goto waitforuninstallation
exit /b
This can be called using:
call :waitforuninstallation PROGRAMNAME.exe
Where PROGRAMNAME is the task running in the task manager.
Edit: made the subroutine carry an argument

Answer 3

There's a really annoying trend with free installers made by NSIS: Cisco Amp, Folding#Home, PsychoPy, Anaconda, PyCharm. The uninstaller exe quits, and something called Un_A.exe takes over and does the rest. In this case, you'd have to wait for that process to finish instead.
powershell while (! (get-process Un_a -ea 0)) { sleep 1 }; 'waiting'; wait-process Un_a
Or if you want the exit code of un_a:
powershell while (! ($proc = get-process Un_A -ea 0)) { sleep 1 }; $handle = $proc.handle; 'waiting'; wait-process Un_A; exit $proc.exitcode