Find GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) of installed programs
After a
long time, I finally motivated myself and wrote this article. As I spent a
couple of hours trying to figure out how to find GUID of Java environment for a
little deployment project, I realized that it’s not an easy task if you don’t
know where to look. You can probably find a couple of third party applications
which can do the job for you. But if you are like me and you don’t want another
piece of software sitting on your computer for a one time shot then this
article is for you… keep reading…
Get your
keyboards ready, we are going to use “PowerShell” or “Command Prompt”. We are
going to use WMIC for this task. For more information about WMIC, click on the
following link.
By using
this command here in “CMD” or “PowerShell” you will get a list of all programs
on your computer with their “Globally Unique Identifiers”.
wmic product list
After
running this command, it can take a couple of seconds before you see the
results so just be patient. Through my tests, the output format of PowerShell
is way better than “CMD”. So if you can, stick with “PowerShell”. While this
command gives you a summary with enough information on installed programs, you
can use the following command to get even more information…
wmic product get
Now, what
if you need to print this list? You can print this list into a text file by
using the following command.
wmic product get > C:\InstalledPrograms.txt
What can I do
with GUID?
GUID is very
useful information if you are doing a lot of deployment tasks. Every MSI file
has a GUID that we can use in order to reinstall or uninstall these programs.
It’s a unique number for a software. This number is the same on every computer
in the world. Let’s look at my case to give you an example. I needed to deploy
the newest version of Java (Java 7u4). While it’s an easy task to deploy the
new version, I had no clue how to uninstall the old version (Java 6u34) which
was present on each computer in our network. So I came across with a couple of
links that were explaining how to uninstall a program silently from computers with
msiexec but it requires you to know and use the GUID of the application that
you want to uninstall. I’ll be writing about how to deploy Java through your
organization…
How to
create a list of all installed programs?
This
document was meant to explain issues with GUIDs but you can also use this
information in order to create a list of all the installed programs without installing
any 3rd party programs.
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