Quote:

things like exist do not work reliably with batch scripts



Hmmmm... well I'm open to learning more. I've used batch in the past for many years and never ran into a problem with using EXIST. Can you demonstrate or show some code where it fails please.


As for the SYSTEM32 I may be mistaken but aside from rouge applications that folder did not exist prior to Windows 98 (iirc). I think Microsoft introduced that folder on 98
I'll take a look at home where I have a clean install I think of both Windows 95B and Windows 98SE, however I still feel that that method could and should be written better.
 
Let's just say for the sake of argument that one or more systems in your organization had a SYSTEM folder from upgrades or something, and in that folder you did have MSIEXEC.EXE but it was version 1.2
Well then this batch comes along and then blindly copies that 1.2 version over the top of your MSIEXEC.EXE version 3.1 in the SYSTEM32 folder without ever checking the version or anything. Doesn't that raise a flag for you? Sure seems like poor coding choice to me.

copy %windir%\system\msiexec.exe %windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /y