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Undocumented stsadm command “stsadm –o uninstall”

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Unfortunately I discovered an undocumented stsadm command today; having gotten into the habit of typing in “stsadm –o commandname” to get the list of parameters needed, I got stung by entering the wrong command name.

I was looking for the parameters to “UninstallFeature”, but I typed only in “uninstall”:

“stsadm –o uninstall”

You should think that this is not a command so it doesn’t matter, even if you type in “stsadm –help” this command will not be listed. OK, I’ll admit my approach to typing in these commands is probably not the best way around, but that is not really the point.

The point is that this command is undocumented, it doesn’t take any arguments, and it will start uninstalling SharePoint without even a warning. So will have to do some manual cleanup and then run the configuration wizard again…

Hope this can warn you before you try this out and thanks to Roy for asking me about uninstalling features, before the coffee had time to kick in.

Links to related content:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms442691.aspx

https://nerdtastictips.blogspot.com/2009/04/never-ever-type-stsadm-o-uninstall-yes.html

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 11, 2009
    Yup, we just did it here. Meant to do uninstallfeature and forgot the feature.... What a lovely piece of functionality!

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2010
    The comment has been removed