Walking the registry, searching DisplayName, removing matching packages?

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1

I’d like to remove all the “Slack Machine-Wide Installer” packages. My approach is listed below. I’m wondering if there’s an easier way to do this?

My approach.

Trying to use Ansible to uninstall packages; with a twist.

Control Panel shows this

Multiple versions of the Slack Machine-Wide Installer. Looking in the registry I find this key (as well as the other guids for the Slack Machine-Wide Installer):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall{81805212-8267-41AE-8F1E-979055EC5DF2}


I’d like to walk the Uninstall registry key, searching the DisplayName for “Slack Machine-Wide Installer” and remove that package.

I can get the Uninstall registry using this task.

  • name: get uninstall registry key
    win_reg_stat:
    path: HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
    register: uninstall_registry

The uninstall_registry.sub_keys contains the list I would like to query for the DisplayName, the below task lets me get the DisplayName of each key

  • name: get properties of uninstall registry key
    win_reg_stat:
    path: HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall{{ item }}
    name: DisplayName
    register: display_name
    with_items:
  • “{{ uninstall_registry.sub_keys }}”

After this I kind of stuck. How do I get just the DisplayName?

  • debug:
    msg: “{{ item }}”
    with_items:
  • “{{ display_name.results }}”

Displays a lot more information then I need. How do I get just the DisplayName?

2

Look at the debug output and “walk” the structure to what you need, then put that into whatever needs it.

For example, when I create an AWS EC2 instance, the result variable contains a list of instances, with a table of attributes for each one. So to get to (say) the instance ID of the first instance in the list, I have to refer to results.instances[0].id

Your results variable is almost certainly structured, so look into that structure, figure out which bit you need, and refer to it using similar syntax.

Regards, K.