How can I make PowerShell wait until a command is complete before proceeding?

Question

I'm using the following line to uninstall office 2007 based on its Product ID

Start-Process C:\Windows\System32\msiexec.exe -ArgumentList "/uninstall {90120000-0030-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}"

I'd like to force a reboot after the uninstall is complete however using -Wait or piping the results to Out-Null don't wait until the uninstall is complete before processing the next line which is a restart. I've also tried using cmd to uninstall but with the same result.

cmd /c "msiexec.exe /uninstall {90120000-0030-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}"

Is there any way to force powershell to wait until the uninstall is complete before processing the Restart-Computer command? I was thinking possibly writing something that detects when the setup.exe process stops before proceeding to the restart?

Answer 1

Start-Process has a wait parameter:

Start-Process C:\Windows\System32\msiexec.exe -ArgumentList "/uninstall {90120000-0030-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}" -wait

The solution to restart after an misexec.exe uninstallation is to add the /forcerestart parameter to the msiexec call instead of trying to restart in powershell (Credits to Matt):

Start-Process C:\Windows\System32\msiexec.exe -ArgumentList @("/uninstall {90120000-0030-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}", "/forcerestart")

Answer 2

My suggestion for this is to actually get the Office Removal Tool from Microsoft and extract the VBS script from it. Run that in a Start-Process with the -wait argument, and reboot afterwards. It will not only attempt to gracefully remove Office with msiexec as you are doing, it will also go back and clean up any straggling files or registry entries in case the application is corrupt and will not uninstall nicely.