Like I said in the comment, you can delete registry keys all you want, either using the command prompt, or manually with Regedit. Now, the big problem is your first point.
- Find all keys, values, and data containing "something".
Unless you were monitoring / auditing the registry when you installed the program (and assuming the happy scenario the program didn't add registry keys at runtime, if so you would need to monitor the registry from start to finish), the program might have added keys to the registry in non-obvious places.
Most programs add their registry keys in the HKEY_CURRENT_USERS\Software
or in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software
in a dedicated branch (I'm looking at wxMaxima, for instance, located in the first path). If you deleted the corresponding branch you could in theory delete all keys associated with the program. However, some programs might alter something somewhere on the rest of the registry, and that doesn't have a good rule of thumb.
If, on the other hand, you did monitor everything, then reversing the changes is trivial (because you know what were they). I suppose you could reinstall the program on a virtual environment and monitor there. In theory you would receive the same results.
From reading the REG help, no option is available to do what you propose on 1. What REG QUERY
does is to check the values inside a registry key. To paste a usage:
C:\Documents and Settings\User>reg query HKCU\Software\wxMaxima
! REG.EXE VERSION 3.0
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\wxMaxima
ShowTips REG_DWORD 0x1
tipNum REG_DWORD 0xb
pos-x REG_DWORD 0xfffffffc
pos-y REG_DWORD 0xfffffffc
pos-w REG_DWORD 0x408
pos-h REG_DWORD 0x2ea
pos-max REG_DWORD 0x1
lastPath REG_SZ (some random path)
maxima REG_SZ C:\Maxima\\bin\maxima.bat
parameters REG_SZ -X '--dynamic-space-size 1000'
fontSize REG_DWORD 0xc
mathFontsize REG_DWORD 0xc
matchParens REG_DWORD 0x1
showLong REG_DWORD 0x0
fixedFontTC REG_DWORD 0x1
changeAsterisk REG_DWORD 0x0
enterEvaluates REG_DWORD 0x0
saveUntitled REG_DWORD 0x1
openHCaret REG_DWORD 0x0
defaultPort REG_DWORD 0xfaa
usejsmath REG_DWORD 0x1
keepPercent REG_DWORD 0x1
pos-restore REG_DWORD 0x0
language REG_DWORD 0x0
fontEncoding REG_DWORD 0x0
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\wxMaxima\AUI
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\wxMaxima\RecentDocuments
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\wxMaxima\Style
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\wxMaxima\Wiz
I'm looking for solutions. One I found involves exporting the Registry to a text file and from there filter the results.
regedt33 is open source tool to find and replace in multiple keys. – JinSnow – 2017-05-07T06:37:31.563
You could, but most likely you wouldn't get what you wanted. I will expand later but consider programs may place registry entries on non-obvious places (which is why uninstallers exist). For the REG command here's the help
– Doktoro Reichard – 2013-09-18T19:45:54.733@DoktoroReichard What would the syntax be for querying all root keys and not just specific keys like HKLM? Is it possible to redirect
Reg Query
toReg Delete
so that found matches are deleted? Can you do it in one line and without any advanced scripting, batch processing, etc.? – Samir – 2013-09-18T19:53:51.260Can you define what you consider to be "something"? Are you looking for value names, key names, data in values, or what? – Doktoro Reichard – 2013-09-18T20:11:14.573
I mean "office12". It doesn't matter if it's a key, value or data. I want to search them all, just like you can check what you want to find using the Ctrl+F (find) command in RegEdit. – Samir – 2013-09-18T20:22:39.040
I was really just looking for a way to automate the process a little bit. Instead of having to do Ctrl+F, type "office12" in the text field, Enter, DEL, F3, DEL, F3, DEL, F3, DEL, etc. – Samir – 2013-09-18T20:23:53.967