this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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The reason you expect this is because Windows has a file lock behaviour that won’t let you delete a file when it’s in use, in Linux this limitation doesn’t exist.
Raymond Chan, arguably one of the best software engineers in the world, and a Microsoft employee, has repeatedly lamented the near malware like work arounds developers have had to invent to overcome this limitation with uninstallers.
Think about uninstalling a game. You need to run “uninstall.exe” but you don’t want uninstall.exe to exist after you’ve run it… but you can’t delete a file that’s in use. Uninstall.exe will always be in use when you run it….so how do you make it remove itself?
Schedule a task? Side load a process? Inject a process? Many ways…. But most look like malware.
Linux has never suffered this flaw.
This seems like a pretty specific use case, but also pretty common. A system function to delete the file that called it should cover that entirely, but I guess psudo-malware is acceptable?
Pseudo-malware is pretty much the way to go as a developer in my experience.
I believe his suggestion of a javascript file that deletes itself works only works because javascript gets sandboxed and doesn't suffer from Windows "flaw" with file locks.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230911-00/?p=108749
While Raymond does offer a solution he's also completely side stepping any responsibility on Microsoft's part in creating and perpetuating this problem without offering their own native solution.
That last bit IMO is one reason to argue against him being the best software engineer. He might have the skills, but they are offset by his conflict of interest with MS.
So what is the solution on windows?
Generally the solution is to do something that looks like malware, or use a third party feature that side steps the problem, as happens with javascript.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230911-00/?p=108749
I made a Batch uninstaller (to one of my other bat scripts I think), and it could remove itself without any problem just with the command "del whateverthenamewas.bat"
Yeah, because the bat file isn't actually running, it's just a list of commands cmd should execute.
Yup, CMD acts as a parser / runtime and the process is bound to the CMD binary, the script file is being run by CMD which keeps a copy of it in its own working memory in RAM