I have a few installers for Linux and Solaris that seem to be picking up the last install location from the last time an installer was ran. For example on one of my linux boxes I just ran an installer and the default path was: /opt/Company/Product but the path that came up was the path I used to install the software last week which was: /opt/Company/Product_Final
I'm assuming that InstallShield is writing out some sort of file that is remembering the install location and my installer is reading this file. How do I stop this from happening?
I believe it is picking up the values through the VPD, which is located for the most part in your $HOME/InstallShield/.. directory! You can check the documentation because it goes to different paths for different platforms!
It will pick up values for installations done on other platforms because you most likely have the same $HOME directory for every platform! You can either rename the $HOME/InstallShield directory prior to installation - or uninstall before installing on another platform!
Thanks Tom that does help, is there any way I can tell my installer not to look at the VPD though? For some reason my installer is picking up install paths that were not even used for this installer, in two cases this installer has never even been run on the machines before and its picking something up besides the default. These problems are all encountered on Linux and Unix boxes.
It wouldn't matter if the installer was not run on that machine, if you installed to say your SunOS machine, the VPD will be created in your $HOME/InstallShield directory. When you go to install on your Linux machine check if $HOME/InstallShield directory exists, I think it does, InstallShield seems to look in there and see the installLocation from the SunOS and think its the same install because it will see the Main Products UID!!! For testing purposes, just move the $HOME/InstallShield to whatever platform you've already installed on:
ie: $HOME/InstallShield_SunOS
Because without this, you will not be able to uninstall the product! So if you just delete the product from the directory - you may want to remove this directory anyway!
You can give it a new VPD location: '-vpd /new/path' and see if it still happens!
You may also want to check your temp directory /var/tmp and remove any istemp or ismp... directories if they exist out there!
