Can't self-uninstall on Windows

[vbabiy]

It tries to delete the executable it is running. I think you may need to launch another process to delete it later

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• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/ianb/pip/issue/126
• Originally Reported By: Dave Abrahams
• Originally Created At: 2010-05-22 22:44:04

[vbabiy]

The same type of problem happens when you try to upgrade pip itself.

'pip install -U pip' "succeeds" in the sense that pip gets upgraded, however
/scripts/pip.exe is not upgrade and pip's setup.py raises an exception.

This is not much of an problem since pip.exe is (hopefully) the last thing to
get upgraded, but if weren't other later script-files would not get upgrade
nor installed at all.

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Original Comment By: Anonymous

[ismailsunni]

So, how do we uninstall this pip?

I tried pip uninstall pip but it's failed

[qwcode]

@pfmoore , the answer is "you can't do this on windows". period. right?

[pfmoore]

Not easily. As @vbabiy said, you might be able to do this by running a new process to delete the final files, or use the "delete on next reboot" APIs. But it's very messy and not really worth it.

[qwcode]

I'm thinking we could improve "get-pip" to handle this case.