also, if the search term needs to be case-insensitive, then add /i to the find command: find/i "\ExpressServer"
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Question
How to remove multiple registry keys using a batch file?
Hi,
I've searched around and found a few solutions for my problem using VBS, but I'd really like to avoid using that method if possible.
I need to remove a pile of separate registry keys (ie: they are not all part of the parent tree, they are all separate keys) that all contain the same word, for example:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWAR
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWAR
etc. etc.
So I could go through the batch file like this:
REG DELETE HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWAR
REG DELETE HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWAR
etc. etc.
however there are so many of these keys that I don't want to have to do it that way, plus I would be unsure if the uninstaller (that would have been run beforehand) would have removed exactly the same keys as the time before (this will be run many times on many servers).
I found a way to use REG QUERY to return the keys that I need:
REG QUERY HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWAR
however I cannot work out a way to nest this within the REG DELETE command - I'm quite sure it's not possible.
So how would I go about doing this?
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Answers
Thanks for the reply knightEknight. It appears to work, however it doesn't actually delete the keys (using your code)!
After doing some reading yesterday, it looks like that any keys that contain other keys need to be recursively removed. So for instance, each of these keys contains another key called Clsid. I didn't realise this would be a problem when I put up the original post.
I suppose I could just append \Clsid, remove that, then remove the parent keys, however what about when I want to use this batch file to remove other keys that may contain different child keys? Is there any way to do this using batchfiles?
OK, after a bit more research and some help from others here, I am using this batch file:
@echo off
if "%1"=="" goto :USAGE
for /f "delims=" %%R in ('REG QUERY "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes" /f "%1"') do call :killit %%R
goto :EOF
:killit
REG DELETE %1 /va /f
if errorlevel 1 echo Error %errorlevel%
goto :EOF
:USAGE
echo regquery keyname
echo Where keyname is a subkey of the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes key
:EOF
and out of that, I get Error code 1. According to this page http://www.computerhope.co
I am logged in as an Administrator on the computer than the batch file is being run on.
Any ideas?
Still doesn't delete the reg keys but I believe this has to do with something else - but I can see it outputs the commands I want in the correct format. I can't find reg 3.0 (the solution posted by my username is someone else in this company) - but I don't believe that is compatible with Server 2003, and I don't believe it will help anyway. Have had to move on, but will revisit this issue in the near future. Thanks again!
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by: knightEknightPosted on 2008-08-19 at 05:08:30ID: 22258997
From a command prompt you can do this:
for /f "delims=" %R in ('REG QUERY HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWAR
From a batch file you need to double-up the % symbols:
for /f "delims=" %%R in ('REG QUERY HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWAR
In BOTH cases you will need to remove the @echo in order for it to actually perform the delete. (I left the @echo in just so you can see what it will do first, before actually doing it.)