Question

I’ve run into a problem getting msiexec to remove java with Powershell. I’ve output my resultant command to the screen and pasted it into a batch file and it runs great. But when it’s executed via Powershell it fails saying the “package cannot be found”. Can anyone spot what I might be doing wrong? I’ve looked up and down google and tried a few different ways of executing the command w/o success and with the same result.

cls
$java = Get-WmiObject -Class win32_product | where { $_.Name -like "*Java*"}
$msiexec = "c:\windows\system32\msiexec.exe";
#$msiexecargs = '/x:"$app.LocalPackage" /qr'
$msiexecargs = '/uninstall "$app.IdentifyingNumber" /qr /norestart'

if ($java -ne $null)
{
    foreach ($app in $java)
    {
        write-host $app.LocalPackage
        write-host $app.IdentifyingNumber
        #&cmd /c "msiexec /uninstall $app.IdentifyingNumber /passive"
        #Start-Process -FilePath $msiexec -Arg $msiexecargs -Wait -Passthru
        [Diagnostics.Process]::Start($msiexec, $msiexecargs);
    }
}
else { Write-Host "nothing to see here..." }
Write-Host "check end"

The goal is to use the Windows 7 logon script to remove all versions of Java on end-user systems and then install the latest. I prefer to make it all Powershell, but if I can’t get this working I’ll just use a batch file hard coded with the uninstall GUID’s

The write-host statements are all for the purpose of debugging, I’m just interested in the execution of msiexec in some variation of this format: msiexec /x {GUID} /passive /norestart

The error I get is:
“This installation package could not be opened. Verify that the package exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer package.”

I know it works on its own, just not in this script…so I’m thinking it’s a syntax thing.

If you have any questions let me know.

Answer 1

First you have to know the difference between this:

"$app.IdentifyingNumber"

and this

"$($app.IdentifyingNumber)"

So I think you wanted to use the latter (the code is a little bit confusing because of the commented lines):

&cmd /c "msiexec /uninstall $($app.IdentifyingNumber) /passive"