~nsu.tmp directory in $TEMP

Hi.

I noticed something strange about the uninstaller. When I run it, it copies itself to "$TEMP\~nsu.tmp\Au_.exe", run it and exit itself. By doing so it allows the removal of the "official" uninstaller executable.

I noticed that the "$TEMP\~nsu.tmp\Au_.exe" file is only removed after reboot. However the "$TEMP\~nsu.tmp" directory is not removed. Is it normal ? I guess it shouldn't be too annoying to stay with an empty temp directory but it would be much cleaner to delete it.

Any idea / remarks about this ?

Thanks,
Sebastien

This is the way that uninstaller is programed to operate, not a big deal I guess leaving an empty dir into $TEMP.

Yeah, but it would be cleaner if the uninstaller copied itself to something like "$TEMP\$name.exe" instead of in a directory of his own... where $name is the result of a call to GetTempFileName. No ?

Sebastien

I couldn't say, being open source, NSIS offers abilities to modify it in the way it suits your needs, moreover if you have added a feature yourself, you can post the source code in the patch tracker,

Maybe we could have some input from NSIS developers as the case may have been thought and they could have thought of potential problems with that approach ?

Sebastien

Originally posted by sebarnolds
Yeah, but it would be cleaner if the uninstaller copied itself to something like "$TEMP\$name.exe" instead of in a directory of his own... where $name is the result of a call to GetTempFileName. No ?

Sebastien

In older NSIS versions it worked just like that. I don't know why it was changed, but I bet there is a reason for it.

Yes there is a reason for it. From top of my head I do not recall why, only I remember was involved back then in some scenario's that benefited having a separate directory.

From the Changelog for NSIS 2.08 (released on July 23rd, 2005):

Made uninstallers copy themselves into a subdirectory of the temporary directory to avoid DLLs left in the temporary directory from being loaded by the uninstaller (patch #1214319)

Hey.

Yeah, thanks for your remarks.

I wrote a patch to remove the directory too. The description can be found here :
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=373087&aid=1660626&group_id=22049

Hope it will be useful,
Sebastien