Adobe CS4 uninstall update

A bit of progress to report on the goal of reliably uninstalling Adobe CS4 applications. Previously, I was looking for a way to silently run the uninstaller that is placed on the local disk when installing a CS4 product. Each Adobe CS4 uninstaller has an alias in /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers/. These aliases point to an app called “Uninstall.app” located in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/{AdobeCode} where {AdobeCode} is a 31-character long hex string unique to the product.

The Uninstaller.app calls the Setup.app in the same directory, which in turn calls the Setup.app in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Installers/R2/

I tried various combinations of calling these different layers of Uninstall/Setup applications, and finally stumbled on one that actually ran enough to provide useful feedback:

This example is for Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Standard:

> cd /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Installers/c62faa3613f56eac60986ad0f177d65
> Setup.app/Contents/MacOS/Setup --uninstall=1 --mode=silent 

This returns Exit Code 0 (good!) and provides a complete log file in /Library/Logs/Adobe/Installers/, but doesn’t actually uninstall anything.

So I tried passing it a uninstall.xml deployment file that listed the CS4 Design Standard payloads; each with an action of “remove” – this is the same uninstall xml file you’d generate if you were following the CS4 Manual Deployment Guide:

Setup.app/Contents/MacOS/Setup --uninstall=1 --mode=silent --deploymentFile=/tmp/uninstall.xml

This completes with an exit code 7 – unable to complete the silent workflow.

Looking at the log in /Library/Logs/Adobe/Installers/, we see this toward the end of the session:

Value returned on lookup of payload: {FB968A89-769D-4D47-BA73-7B21DB543B9F} Adobe Acrobat 9 Prois: false
Payload {FB968A89-769D-4D47-BA73-7B21DB543B9F} Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro is not installed so should not be there in the deployment file
[       0] Thu Feb 25 15:33:36 2010 FATAL
Exception: Payload{FB968A89-769D-4D47-BA73-7B21DB543B9F} Adobe Acrobat 9 Prois not installed so should not be there in the deployment file
Exit code: 7

D’oh! That’s the same error we were getting when we used the AdobeUberUninstaller and the AdobeUberUninstaller.xml file from the Adobe CS4 Enterprise Deployment Toolkit!

So… We now have a way to do an uninstall using the locally-installed resources. But we still need a way to invoke it so it behaves like it does when you run it manually and check “Select all” and click “Uninstall”.

Advertisement