How to Uninstall Software using Python?

In this article, we are going to learn how to uninstall software using Python.

Performing operations on the operating system are one of the most common use cases of Python language. The inclusions of the os library offer application processing capabilities to the Python programming language.

Uninstall Software Using Python

For uninstalling an application from the operating system, the "wmic" command presenting the command processor of Windows OS would be used. The wmic (Windows Management Instrumentation Command) command is used to retrieve a huge range of information about local or remote computers or make configuration changes to multiple remote machines. In this case, we would be using it to install software from the Operating system.

To get a list of installed software on the Operating system, run the following command in the command prompt (cmd.exe):

wmic product get description

These are all the software that "wmic" could perform its operations over. The list may not be complete. For demonstration, the DaVinci Resolve software would be removed. The command would be

Example 1:

In this example, we are going to uninstall software installed on our system using the command whose syntax is given below.

wmic product where description="Application_Name" uninstall

where Application_Name is the application's name that is to be uninstalled. Now we would be making use of the command mentioned above in Python. The software that would be uninstalled for demonstration would be DaVinci Resolve, a popular media processing package.

import os

# Name of the application that is to be uninstalled
# Obtained by "wmic product get description" 
software = "DaVinci Resolve"

# Starting an instance of command prompt and 
# passing the command as argument
os.system(f'wmic product where description="{software}" uninstall')

Output:

Explanation:

Firstly the name of the software that is to be uninstalled is assigned to the software variable. The application name should be obtained using the wmic product get description list. This is to assure that the correct name is provided as an argument for uninstallation. The DaVinci Resolve software would be uninstalled for demonstration (the name could be seen in the list). Then a call to the os.system function is made, which invokes the operating system's command interpreter (cmd.exe in this case). Then it passes an f-string where the software name would be placed from the variable, and the rest of the command (for uninstalling software) remains the same.  

Example 2:

Similarly, to uninstall software named Epic Games (a popular software publisher), the code would be:

import os

# Name of the application that is to be uninstalled
# Obtained by "wmic product get description" 
software = "Epic Games"

# Starting an instance of command prompt and 
# passing the command as argument
os.system(f'wmic product where description="{software}" uninstall')

Output:

In the same way, any application that is present inside the list obtained by the command wmic product get description could be uninstalled. But not all applications can be uninstalled without user consent. i.e., There are applications and softwares requiring user authorization to initiate the uninstall procedure. And some applications/softwares require a user to have certain access control to initiate the uninstall process. Hence, the above procedure could not be used to uninstall such softwares.